


Nobody Decent

by lorata



Series: We Must Be Killers: Tales from District 2 [15]
Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Careers (Hunger Games), Careers Have Issues, District 2, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mentors, Recovery, Victors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-21
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-02-18 07:29:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 49,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2340146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorata/pseuds/lorata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Artemisia grins, slow and creeping like the spread of fresh blood across the floor. "Oh mentor, I think I like you."</i>
</p><p><i>Lyme actually laughs, using the burst of sound to chase away the last of the demons clawing at her skull. "Good. I chose you because --"</i> I saw myself, because everyone else had given up on you, because you'd given up on yourself, because I know you're more than this -- <i>"I knew you could do this, and you're going to prove me right."  </i></p><p>District 2 Victor Lyme, two years fresh from the Arena, gets her first tribute to mentor. Her vow to remain aloof to avoid getting attached lasts until she finds Artemisia: wicked, irreverent, blase and a little unhinged, whose childhood photos showed bruises her Games training never put there. </p><p>The day Artemisia volunteers, the male tribute from District 6 reveals a girlfriend back home with a baby on the way. The tragic story sweeps the Capitol by storm, and it seems like the ending to these Games is already written. Lyme has to change the narrative, convince her suspicious tribute to trust her, and -- if Artemisia wins -- figure out how to piece the half-mad Victor back together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hard-Knock Eyes and a Fuck-You Smile

**Author's Note:**

> People have asked me about Artemisia (Misha), who's been in the background of a few of my series stories. Well, here you go! It started out as a character exercise and now it's growing into something a little more ambitious, so I hope people enjoy.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _ARTEMISIA J. says the name under the photograph, a picture of a girl with a hard, arrogant expression, her chin tilted up like she's challenging the camera. A quick flick through shows incidents of insubordination and a propensity to act like she didn't care, right until she sauntered up to the task and scored the highest marks. Her personal file with pre-Residential details makes note of bruises that didn't come from training and a casual disregard of authority because whatever the Centre might dish out, she'd seen worse._
> 
> Remembering Nero's emotional investment in her, Lyme determines to be professional and distanced. It doesn't work so well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You'll notice that this first chapter jumps ahead a few times; this is because I've written too many tribute parades, interviews, and all that other stuff to want to do it again. We get the drill by now, I think. ;)

Lyme is the first Victor in recent District 2 history to wait only the minimum one year before applying to be a mentor. The Capitol got wind of it as soon as she put her name in at the training centre, of course, and there's been buzz over Two's latest and youngest mentor and the level of dedication that the new Victors are showing. Lyme smiles and gives sound-bite interviews about her duty and being excited to see action again even from a distance, because she knows her job and she's not stupid enough to tell them that every day she does nothing it feels like more names added to her debt.

Normally, the Centre tell her, the mentors choose their tributes on their own, without anyone watching. It's a private moment, meant for reflection and honest evaluation, and each mentor has their own system that they slowly perfect over the years. They can share it or they can keep it a secret, it doesn't really matter, but the important thing is that each mentor gets to choose in their own way.

At least -- after the first time. This year Lyme has to sit with Nero to oversee her choice. A spark of the old irritation wells up that she's not allowed to have this moment without her mentor, hulking and silent, looking over her shoulder, but this wasn't his call. The higher-ups made it and Nero's giving her as much space as he can, leaving her to go through the files while he waits in the kitchen and only coming in after she's made her decision.

Nero said when he chose her that it felt like someone reached into his chest and ripped a piece of him out, and he knew he'd never get it back unless she won the Games. It sounded melodramatic and overemotional and not a little terrifying -- Lyme isn't here to find replacements for the children she already knows she's refusing to have, she's here to save lives and that's it -- and she holds onto that. She asked Brutus, and he said he chose Emory because he knew they'd work well together and he thought she could get the job done; that sounds good to Lyme. Feelings are messy, and anyway, they can come later. Right now it's about who can bring it home, and who Lyme can put back together when it's done.

That holds until she flips over one of the pages and takes a hard jolt to the gut. ARTEMISIA J. says the name under the photograph, a picture of a girl with a hard, arrogant expression, her chin tilted up like she's challenging the camera. A quick flick through shows incidents of insubordination and a propensity to act like she didn't care, right until she sauntered up to the task and scored the highest marks. Her personal file with pre-Residential details makes note of bruises that didn't come from training and a casual disregard of authority because whatever the Centre might dish out, she'd seen worse.

(Lyme takes a deep breath and chases back the shadows of fingers on her shoulder. It's over, she's safe, it's fine.)

Lyme remembers Artemisia, vaguely. They sparred before Lyme went in -- one of the handful of younger girls and boys that Lyme as the Volunteer candidate was told to take down, knock them back a bit and fuel their desire to try harder -- and she recalls an easy grace and an underlying viciousness that impressed her even back with the upcoming Arena gnawing on her mind. From what she remembers it's not surprising Artemisia made it this far.

What's surprising is that when Lyme moves to set her file aside and check the next candidate, she can't. Her fingers stay glued to the manila folder and the pages inside, and Lyme ends up flipping back all the way through to the youngest photos, where the girl's smile is darker and nastier and she's not as good at hiding it under a mask of nonchalance. Her breath sticks hard in her chest and her focus tunnels, and when Lyme finally forces herself to examine the others it feels as though she's looking at them through a gauze screen. The only one that matters is the girl with the hard-knock eyes and the fuck-you smile.

"Nero," Lyme calls out, swallowing and wetting her lips and trying to sound normal. "I think I've got one."

Nero ambles over and drops onto the couch, which creaks vaguely but doesn't snap. Lyme's hands shake as she gives him the file, and he runs through it with a decade's worth of efficiency, meaning it's all of five seconds before his eyebrows creep up his forehead. "Are you sure?"

"She's got the best scores," Lyme says, because she did check. She might've been blindsided but that doesn't mean she's going to pick a tribute based on photographs and personal anecdotes. "Nailed her kill tests and acting, and they've never seen anyone better with a sword on both sides."

Nero hums and examines one of the pages without looking up. "I'm not arguing that she's the best on paper, but she also looks like she'd be better off with a veteran. Girl like that is gonna be hard to handle on the other side, and she might not even listen to you before."

Lyme glares. "And so, what, stick her with Odin? He'd just try to drown her in his glory talk, if he picked her at all, and even if he did he wouldn't _get_ her. I do."

Nero doesn't say anything, just looks at her with a fond expression that used to make Lyme want to carve out his eyes and now makes her flush and turn away. "I do know that feeling," he says, his tone light and amused. "I'm not going to argue with you, but the committee will need to be convinced, so let's practice. Tell me why you want her, and leave the feelings out of it. We save those for after."

Lyme nods. It's a good point -- Nero wouldn't have managed to get assigned to her if he'd come in and started babbling about feeling their _connection_ or whatever -- and it will help her organize her thoughts. "Okay," she says. "How about trends, then. The 50s haven't been very showy, polls say audiences are getting bored, and all of Artemisia's kills and her Field Exam show she's flashy and exciting..."

 

* * *

 

It takes two hours of arguing and negotiation, but finally Lyme leaves the selection committee with a form stamped APPROVED in big red letters. She holds the file against her chest all the way back to the Village in the passenger seat of Nero's truck, and she does her best to chase away the flutters in her stomach. When the head trainer and the Program director signed their names at the bottom of the paper -- when Lyme bent and scribbled the same -- she couldn't chase the shudder that ran through her, that she'd chosen this fierce, brilliant girl only to send her to her death.

It's normal to think that, Nero tells her, but it's not true. Nothing's certain except possibility. No reason to believe a tribute can't make it home until the moment they don't.

 

* * *

 

"You've gotta be fucking kidding," Brutus bursts out, looking up from Artemisia's file. "She looks insane!"

Lyme bares her teeth and only barely holds back from punching him. Just because Brutus likes his noble children of the quarries doesn't mean everyone has to; Lyme thinks Emory is boring and Emory thinks Lyme is borderline, and that's just fine. "She's good," she says. "And all you have to do is help me help her win. I get her after that."

Brutus runs a hand over his head. It's the two of them together this year, with Ronan as their behind-the-scenes advisor, but the final decision is Lyme's, since she's the one who will be in charge of recovery. "Okay then," Brutus says. "There's a lot to work with, anyway, so I guess there's that."

"Damn right there is," Lyme snaps, snatching Artemisia's file away and trying not to feel like Brutus just called her baby ugly. "There are tons of angles we could take with her."

"I think we can safely drop 'honour' from the possibilities," Brutus says dryly, but he holds up both hands in apology and mock-defeat when Lyme snarls. "Kidding, kidding. Let's start making a list."

 

* * *

 

A few minutes before the Reaping in Two is scheduled to start, a runner brings Lyme and Callista the results from the districts in the time zones further east. Nothing but names and ages, and even that is considered a major privilege to have ahead of time; Lyme scans the list while waiting for the cue to take the stage but nothing jumps out. An eighteen-year-old girl from Nine, a seventeen-year-old boy from Six, and a thirteen-year-old from Twelve, but they'll have to wait for the rest as the sun moves west. It's the usual spread of ages beyond that, which at least means no surprises and that's something.

Callista glances at Lyme as they wait behind the heavy oak doors of the Justice Building. "You'll be fine," she says. Lyme has no idea what she's talking about until the older woman quirks a smile and flicks a finger at Lyme's hands, and oh. She's shredded the paper with the list into tiny pieces, and Lyme flushes hot and looks around for an aide to hand it to. "Just drop it," Callista says with a wave of her hand. "It will give the cleaning staff a thrill, someone will likely have it framed."

That -- no. Lyme isn't all about the rules and propriety like Brutus or Emory, but she shoves the torn fragments into her pocket anyway while Callista rolls her eyes. She's fine, she's not nervous, it's just -- she's on the _stage_ . Last year she stood next to Nero in the Victors' Box, and even that -- watching the process from above, not from the square with the rest of the population -- had given her the shakes. Now she's going to be up with the mayor and the director and the line of ceremonial Peacekeepers because this is it. She's not just a Victor anymore; as soon as the Reaping is over and the tributes stand on stage, she'll be a _mentor_.

It's a hell of a thing.

"Here," Callista says, and holds out a packet of mints. "It'll help, I promise."

Lyme swallows the automatic protest that she's fine, because Callista has been doing this since Lyme was a kid and she's not likely to be impressed by a first-year mentor's posturing. She takes a mint and holds it under her tongue, and the splash of cool flavour sends a jolt through her while simultaneously calming her nerves. Lyme shoots Callista a startled look.

"I have them made special," Callista says with a razor smile, and she hands Lyme the tin. "Don't take more than one every two hours and you'll be fine."

"Thanks," Lyme says dubiously, slipping the tin of drugged mints into her other pocket, but then the doors pull open from the other side and the first glare of sunlight blasts through the widening crack. This is it. Lyme straightens her shoulders, raises her head and flattens out her fingers, uncurling her nervous fists before walking out onto the stage to the roar of applause.

 

* * *

 

Artemisia steps forward for a wide-eyed fourteen-year-old with her hair tied up in braided pigtails, lazily raising her hand and calling out the sacred phrase like she's a student answering a teacher's question only because no one else in the room wants to bother answering. The cameras magnify her careless grin, her saunter up to the stage, and -- best of all -- the wink she actually tosses off at the terrified girl she's replacing as she strolls past.

Brutus' flat-eyed stare bludgeons Lyme all the way from the Victors' Box without her having to look at him, but he can go fuck himself. This is just the Reaping; tributes are allowed to be cocky now, it's when it's closer to the Arena that the Gamemakers start looking for ways to strike them down. Lyme was confident too -- they all were. The stage is a relief after the edginess of the morning, standing in the square with sweat trickling over the skin and tuning out the speeches; better than the week before with the last-minute prep sessions and interminable waiting.

Artemisia speeds up as she makes her way closer to the stage, and by the end she takes the stairs two at a time, executing a perfect spin-turn on one foot and coming to stand with her hands clasped behind her back, expression artfully crafted into one of lofty obedience. As soon as the escort asks her name she breaks into a sharp-toothed grin, and she digs her fingers into the soft, painted hand that shakes hers in congratulation.

"You should congratulate the viewers, not me," Artemisia drawls in a husky voice that will captivate and enthral audiences without promising a spectacle of nothing but sex. "They're the ones who are going to get one hell of a show."

This time Lyme does flick her gaze to Brutus, who somehow gives the impression of raising an eyebrow without actually moving his face.

 

* * *

 

Callista's boy is sharp and small and mean, with muscles like whipcord and hands that itch for knives. He never stops twitching, grinning out at the crowd and all but bouncing on his heels, and his wild, almost frenetic energy contrasts sharply with Artemisia's cool, almost languid arrogance. They're a good set, opposing temperaments but with the same promise of blood; even two years out, Lyme has to repress a shudder when they smile.

The Capitol will be salivating, straining at the wait for this pair to taste first blood. Jasper bares his teeth in a smile that terrifies a child near the stage; Artemisia tilts her head and raises one hand in front of her face, examining her fingernails and rubbing away a speck of dirt with her thumb.

 

* * *

 

The numbers for One, Seven and Ten come in while Artemisia and Jasper wait in their rooms in the Justice Building. Lyme glances over the spread -- a twelve and a sixteen from Ten, a fourteen and fifteen from Seven, and the usual eighteen/sixteen split from One -- without much surprise. She's going over the travel arrangements with Philomena when Brutus comes in to find her, expression somber.

"What?" Lyme asks, angling herself away from him. If he's here to lecture her on how she needs to take Artemisia down a peg, she already knows that --

"We've got trouble," he says. "Dark horse from Six. Sponsor goldmine, half the live Reaping coverage is on him."

"From Six?" Lyme blinks. Six's Victors tend to come from nowhere; not even Phillips, their youngest, ten years out next year and the only Victor not to turn to the syringe, didn't make much of an impression until he blinded another tribute with glitter and bashed his skull in with a rolling pin. She can't remember the last time a Six was anything special at the Reaping. "Volunteer?"

"Not exactly," Brutus says, and hands over a portable video player.

Lyme lets the footage roll and forgets to breathe until it's over. She looks up at Brutus, eyes wide, and he stares back with his mouth set in a grim line. "It's just the Reaping," Lyme says, handing the player back to Brutus, who shoves it under his arm.

"Yep," he says, but his boy lost a tribute to a dark horse from Ten just last year, and it shows in the hard set of his shoulders. "Still, we've gotta talk to those kids. They can't just swagger their way through this, not anymore. Right now they're setting themselves up to be second place in someone else's finale."

A wash of anger, possessive and terrifying in its strength, washes through Lyme and grips her so hard she nearly stumbles. "It's early," she says, gritting her teeth. "We have time. I'm not losing to a sob story."

Brutus gives her a sidelong look, but then he recovers himself and socks her in the arm. "Good," he says. "We've got half an hour to the train, may as well get started."

 

* * *

 

The train pulls away from the crowds and they all head inside. Lyme hangs back, watching the kids to get an idea of who they are on their own, without flashbulbs exploding in their faces. Artemisia sprawls on the couch in the main train car, one leg up on the windowsill and one arm behind her head. She's pulled a knife out of nowhere and flips it between her fingers; across the aisle Jasper does the same, fanning out a thin collection of blades between his knuckles and making them disappear.

"Showoff," Artemisia calls over at him, slipping her knife between her index and middle fingers and flipping him off with the blade. "You know more knives won't make up for having a tiny dick."

"Bigger than yours," Jasper shoots back.

Artemisia shows her teeth. "I wouldn't be so sure."

Jasper flings a knife at her, but Callista swoops into the room right as he lets it fly, plucking the weapon out of the air and tucking it into her elaborate updo. Artemisia grins at Callista and tips an invisible hat at her, and Lyme fights down a stab of jealousy before striding into the room, Brutus on her heels.

Artemisia flicks a glance at Lyme and grins, swinging her foot over the edge of the couch. "Hey, it's my mentor," she says, voice tinged with mocking and more than a dash of insubordination, but that's all right. Lyme flat-out scowled at Nero for almost the entire train ride. "How'd I look out there?"

This is it. Lyme swallows her nerves and tries not to feel the years separating her fledgling experience from Callista's. "Like you didn't give a shit," she says. "Not bad for the Reaping, but if you're going to keep people's attention you've got to give them a reason to care. Acting like you could just as easily stay home and eat ice cream out of the carton isn't going to impress anyone."

They taught her how to strike the proper balance between authority and heavy-handedness, but Lyme still holds her breath until Artemisia lets out a scoffing sort of laugh and drops back against the cushions. "Good thing I have two experienced mentors to help me out, lucky me," she says, and Brutus clicks his tongue.

"That's right," Lyme says mildly, refusing to take the bait. Not long ago she was a cocky tribute looking to get a rise out of her mentor, too, recent enough to remember the urge but not so close that Lyme can't tell exactly what Artemisia is doing. "But there's a wrinkle this year and it's going to change the way you play."

Artemisia frowns -- Jasper shoves his knives into a pocket and sits forward, elbows on his knees -- and Lyme turns to Callista. This will be better off coming from the senior mentor, and Ronan is off talking with Philomena in another compartment.

Callista doesn't bother with preamble; she turns on the television and spools up the Reaping footage, fast-forwarding through the districts until they hit Six. The main square is dark and murky, the pale sun filtering weakly through yellow smog; behind the Justice Building, tall smokestacks spew out clouds of smoke from the factories. The Six stop on Lyme's Victory Tour gave her a low, hacking cough that sat in her chest for weeks afterward, the falling snow grey and filthy before it touched the ground.

"Nice vacation spot," Artemisia says, leaning back and pulling one leg up to her chest, lacing her fingers over her knee. Brutus gives her a dagger glare, and the girl responds with a wide, shit-eating smile.

"We're not watching this for the scenery," Callista says, and Artemisia sinks down in her seat like she's just been scolded by a favourite teacher. "Pay attention."

Lyme saw it on the portable player earlier, but it's something else in high definition on a four-foot screen. The girl they call to the stage is unremarkable, bones poking out at all angles underneath her morphling-yellowed skin, and Artemisia shifts in her seat and pulls a face. "Wait," Lyme says, and the girl tilts her head, expression sharpening. Lyme feels a flash of pride; Artemisia might act like she doesn't give a shit, but she wouldn't be on this train if that were true.

And then, the boys.

The escort calls a seventeen-year-old who stiffens and curls his fists, expression resolving almost instantly into a determined glare. He hasn't bothered to clean up for the Reaping, scrubbing off the factory grit like so many of his fellow citizens, either because it's too expensive to waste the water or it's the only kind of rebellion an outlier has. Regardless, the cameras love him already; tall and dark with bright blue eyes, a strong jaw and high cheekbones that will look even more handsome with an artistic layer of Arena grime.

Jasper's eyes narrow, and Artemisia snorts and wrinkles her nose. "That's it?" she scoffs, waving a hand. "So he's pretty. Not all outliers look like they fell off the back of a truck."

"Wait," Lyme says again, drawing out the word, and this time Artemisia drops both legs over the side of the couch and sits up to watch.

The boys stand aside, leaving a wide, empty swath down the centre of the square. The boy stalks forward, a muscle jumping in his jaw, and he's halfway there when a pretty, blue-eyed girl bursts out of the crowd and runs after him -- or tries. The swell of her stomach against the fabric of her dress keeps her from making it more than a few steps, and the boy heads back to her. A pair of Peacekeepers starts to step in, but the escort onstage coos and tells them to give the adorable couple a moment.

It's an exception right out of the gate -- this is what the Justice Building visits are for -- but it's also not hard to see why they allow it; in ratings terms it's pure gold. The boy cradles his girl's face in his hands, speaking to her in a low, urgent tone, and he wipes her tears with his thumbs and kisses her forehead. He places one hand over her stomach and crouches down to whisper a few words, then finally the Peacekeepers gesture and he tears himself away, walking up to the stage with his head held high.

Onstage he ignores the attempts to banter and stares straight ahead, and he doesn't have the training to locate the cameras but they swoop to find him so his gaze jabs the viewers like a spear.

Callista pauses the feed on his face. "I don't think I need to show you the commentary track," she says in a deceptively placid tone that reminds Lyme of the flash of sunlight on a blade before it descends. "I've been going over the unofficial channels, and all the coverage is going to Six thus far. Two has received barely a mention. The official broadcast this evening will be nonpartisan, of course, but as for everything else -- this is the narrative we have to beat, people. Sauntering around like you're too good for the competition isn't going to cut it."

Artemisia growls. "This is bullshit!" she bursts out, and Brutus' eyebrows draw together but Lyme knows a few things about picking her battles, and she lets it slide. "We train our whole lives for this! Meanwhile some jackass is too stupid to use a condom and now he gets all the airtime? That's not fucking fair!"

"It's not fair, but it's happened," Lyme says, and Artemisia whirls and sticks her with a furious glare. "There's no point trying to argue. People love romance and they love babies. We just have to give them something better."

"It's almost too bad he can't win, because it would be hilarious," Jasper says, and Lyme raises an eyebrow while Artemisia makes a scornful sound that sounds like it was dredged up from her toes. "No, seriously, think about it! He'd be all Arena-crazy, right? First time the baby woke him up crying he'd probably strangle it before he opened his eyes, and his girlfriend too. Best headline ever. If it can't be me I totally hope that happens."

"You're a sick fuck, you know that," Artemisia says, eyeballing him as though she can't decide on being impressed or disturbed.

Brutus' face twists into a grimace, and he turns his back as he pretends to examine the beverage cart, likely staring at all the booze he'd love to pour down his throat right now but can't. Lyme lets out a hard breath, horrified despite thinking she'd heard everything, but Callista merely takes a smooth step over to her tribute and cuffs him hard in the head.

"That's enough," Callista says, and she's still speaking calmly but her voice sharpens. Jasper shuts his mouth without a protest. "If the children have finished their tantrums and playtime and don't require a diaper change, I'd like to actually get to work."

Artemisia settles, and even Jasper subsides with little more than a wrinkled nose and exaggerated flop into his seat. Callista has never saved a tribute but her authority fills the car anyhow, and maybe one day Lyme will be able to come close to that.

"Good," the older woman says, nodding. "Shall we?"

 

* * *

 

Artemisia and Jasper return from the parade flushed and laughing, jostling each other and talking smack as they occasionally stop to send twin terrifying stare-downs at the outlying tributes. "How did it go?" Lyme asked, even though she watched it herself from the sidelines, eyes glued to the screens showing Artemisia's face with its savage, brilliant grin. This year their stylist dressed them as a pair of mountain hawks, complete with wings, feathered helmets, and bronze and white face paint.

"Asshole here called dibs on every single tribute," Artemisia says, rolling her eyes and shoving Jasper into the Five chariot. "Apparently he gets everyone and we all are just gonna sit back and enjoy the show. Boy, you're not half pretty enough for that."

"That's just because you haven't seen me with my makeup on," Jasper retorts, and he mimes a stab at her stomach and swipes invisible blood across his cheekbones. Artemisia snorts and strangles him with her imaginary intestine, and Lyme swallows the sour taste in her mouth.

"Enough," Lyme says, because Callista can't be the one to break up the shenanigans all the time. "Let's get upstairs."

"You're just jealous because you could never pull off this stunning ensemble," Artemisia says, lifting her arms and letting the feathered cape fall across her shoulders.

Lyme takes a page from Brutus' book and doesn't react, not even to roll her eyes. "That's definitely it," she says, and Artemisia snickers. "Upstairs, we've got debriefing to do."

They pass the Sixes on their way to the elevator, and this year they're dressed from neck to ankles in shining silver like the finish on the expensive Capitol automobiles. It could either be bodysuits or just poured straight on them, and Six Boy's blue eyes stand out in his freshly-washed face with grim determination as he helps his wobbling, jaundiced district partner down from the chariot. Artemisia's attention flickers over to them, and she bares her teeth in a snarl.

"Save it for the Arena," Lyme warns her, and Artemisia backs down, tossing her hair over her shoulder with studied unconcern. Six doesn't even look up, and Lyme puts him out of her mind.

"If we take the back way, we'll accidentally run into a group of reporters who will be happy to see a pair of champions," Callista drawls, and Lyme jerks her head around to look at her because she didn't know that, and she's pretty sure unscheduled interviews are against the rules. Nobody told her about this in mentor training. "Accidentally," Callista repeats, and both their tributes exchange sharp-toothed smiles.

"Officially, no," Brutus says under his breath when Lyme steps in close to ask. "You'll find out a lot of stuff that ain't official, I'm sorry I didn't think about this one before. You'll catch on quick."

Lyme doesn't have time to answer, because Callista pushes open the side door and steps out into an explosion of flashbulbs. "Now really," Callista says, her voice a picture-perfect mix of surprise and amusement. "Vultures, look at you, waiting at private entrances for tributes who are tired after a long journey. Though I suppose if you've been this patient, we could spare a minute, but I'd better see a nice writeup tomorrow..."

Jasper and Artemisia sweep forward to the front, and Lyme lifts up a silent prayer that she'll be able to keep her head above water.

 

* * *

 

"Don't engage with Six," Lyme tells Artemisia at breakfast the next morning. "The more you make him your rival, the more free publicity you're giving him. Stick with the Pack today, try to hit all the combat stations."

"I know that," Artemisia says idly, peeling a banana in long, languid strokes. "He's not worth my time, I wasn't Reaped yesterday." She chuckles at her own joke, glancing around the table to see if anyone got it.

Her Centre file noted a fair bit of approval-seeking buried underneath the aggressive nonchalance, and Lyme takes a risk. "Well played," she says, letting her mouth twitch up at one corner instead of glaring or rolling her eyes, and Artemisia keeps her gaze down at her plate but she straightens her spine, just a little. "Good, if we're both on the same page that saves time. Do the rounds, but be noncommittal, don't go all out on anything. Just enough to keep them interested and give the outliers nightmares."

Artemisia looks up at her for the first time that morning and tilts her head to one side. "You want me to scare the meat?"

"Oh yes," Lyme says, and her girl's face lights up. "If you make one of them wet themselves, you can have any fruit you want for dessert tonight."

"You're on," Artemisia says, and bites her banana in half.

 

* * *

 

(It's the boy from Three. Artemisia chooses a pomegranate, and by the time she's finished her lips and fingers are stained a rich, dark red. She smiles at Lyme with crimson-smeared teeth and Lyme digs the handle of her knife into her thigh under cover of the table.)

 

* * *

 

The third night, Lyme pulls Artemisia aside after dinner. "Let's go out to the balcony," she says, cocking her head toward the door.

Artemisia and Jasper exchange looks that slide into identical knowing, nasty grins. "Looks like it's getting serious," Jasper says, and he bounces up from the table, fingers twitching with restless energy. "Callista, can I have private strategy too?"

Lyme doesn't stay behind to hear them negotiate, since they'll be having the inverse of the conversation she's gearing up for right now. She steps outside into the evening air, artificially modified inside the force field into a perfect lack of temperature that's startlingly jarring just by its sheer, pleasant engineered neutrality. Artemisia follows her, hands in her pockets, and she's all but strolling except her eyes are alert and the line of her shoulders hunched.

"Don't worry about Jasper," Artemisia says when the door closes behind them, and Lyme actually blinks. In response, the girl tilts her head to the side and studies Lyme with narrowed eyes, flicking her gaze up and down. "He plays with his food, but he'd do me clean because I'm his district partner and he's willing to make an exception. So it's not like he'd torture me."

Lyme wears the mask like she was born to do it, even though inside her chest squeezes that they've talked about this. District partners don't bring it up, they're not supposed to; never forget they're opponents, sure, but always maintain the veneer of alliance until the moment it breaks. "He won't, no, because you're going to win," she says, letting her voice go hard, brooking no dissent.

Artemisia's eyebrows creep up. "So confident."

Lyme doesn't play. She folds her arms, leans back against the balcony wall and returns a raised-eyebrows look herself, tilting her chin down and using every inch of her height advantage. "Aren't you?"

After a second, Artemisia lets out a grudging bark of a laugh. "Okay, okay. So how should I kill him, then?"

The last time Lyme talked strategy in the nights before the Arena, she listened to her mentor as he told her his, even if she challenged him and asked him to explain instead of following orders like a good little Brutus. She's spent the past year learning tricks and tactics from the mentor box, but she's only ever played them out in scenarios with her instructors. This time there's a life on the line, but for the first time since joining the Program, it isn't hers.

Lyme counts off her breaths in her head to try to shove away the jitters. "You don't. You're good at manipulating people; work the Pack so that when it breaks, someone else takes him out in the split, but don't let the audience know it was you."

She doesn't say 'try', doesn't say 'if you can', because while her mind screams with all the _ifs_ , scrabbles at her with the need for alternatives because what if the Pack aligns differently, what if the Gamemakers engineer the split themselves, what if what if _what if_ , she can't bring that with her. Artemisia needs her mentor's confidence; needs to forget that the most terrifying part of the Arena isn't what you can control, it's what you can't. Artemisia doesn't look like the type to overthink, but kids have broken against the grain before.

Artemisia frowns. "Really?" she asks, but there's as much curiosity as there is challenge in her voice. She starts to bring her hands out of her pockets before shoving them back in, and ha. "How come?"

Lyme's mouth sours, but she fights the urge to swallow; Artemisia will see her throat move and right now she needs to be the mountains. "Because you kill your district partner or you kill the dark horse outlier with the touching story, but not both. You split the Pack, then you kill Six, then you kill whoever takes out Jasper. Make yourself the villain who redeems herself, not the monster they're rooting for someone else to kill."

This time it's Artemisia's turn to blink, though she covers it a second later with a smirk that doesn't quite stay solid. "Villain, huh?"

"Your number one opponent is a boy who keeps trying to show the trainers pictures of his pretty, pregnant girl back home," Lyme says dryly, and Artemisia's eyes flash with instinctive hatred. "Of course you're going to be the villain, that's what they want to see. They'll be cheering you on for every tribute you kill because it'll be that much more satisfying when Six finally kills you."

Artemisia bristles, yanking her hands free to curl them into fists. "The hell he will!"

"The hell he will," Lyme echoes firmly, and Artemisia lets out a short breath. "Because you're going to off him before the Final Four, give yourself enough time to turn it around. They love him now but they'll forget soon enough. If you can avenge your district partner by offing whoever killed him, so much the better."

"Huh." Artemisia rocks back on her heels. "And I've gotta do Six fast, I'm guessing."

"You do," Lyme acknowledges. "There's no way to come back from torturing a kid who's a father, the audience will scream until the Gamemakers drop a rock on you. But you don't have to make it clean."

Again she's rewarded by a startled blink, then a thoughtful stare. "Okay, I'll bite."

Lyme presses her tongue against the backs of her teeth to stop herself from wetting her lips or gnawing the inside of her cheek or any other tell that would betray her. "Clean kills are for allies, twelve-year-olds, and opponents you respect. You show respect to his girl back home by making it quick so she doesn't have to watch him suffer, but you don't respect _him_. He's the idiot who got a girl pregnant when they weren't safe yet, he's the one who's responsible for this situation. He's not the hero, he's a stupid kid who couldn't keep it in his pants and is hoping nobody remembers that without the Arena his precious wife and baby would've lived in poverty for the rest of their lives." She catches herself then, the rage building and flaring up into a roaring fire inside her, turning her words into red-hot weapons ready to sink through flesh. Lyme yanks herself back before she disappears into it. "Fast, but messy. That's your goal. No speeches, no grandstanding, just do it. They'll get the message."

A long pause, then Artemisia grins, slow and creeping like the spread of fresh blood across the floor. "Oh mentor, I think I like you."

Lyme actually laughs, using the burst of sound to chase away the last of the demons clawing at her skull. "Good. I chose you because --" _I saw myself, because everyone else had given up on you, because you'd given up on yourself, because I know you're more than this_ \-- "I knew you could do this, and you're going to prove me right."

Artemisia straightens and snaps off a picture-perfect salute, eyes bright with teasing but not -- quite -- mocking, not anymore. "Yes sir."

"Good," Lyme says, and her arms ache to pull this girl close and tell her it's all right, that she has someone who believes in her and sees not just Arena potential but the lifetime after it. Instead she lets a hand fall to Artemisia's shoulder, clapping hard and giving her a shake. "I'll see you in the morning."

Lyme walks past her, through the balcony door and into the Games complex, and doesn't look back to see whether Artemisia is watching.

 

* * *

 

Artemisia holds the record for swordsmanship as far back as the Centre has ever recorded; Brutus and Lyme both topped their years, but prime vs. prime with no extenuating circumstances, just a good, pure duel, Artemisia could take them both out without trying. When it's time for her private session, Lyme tells her to showcase that.

"Nothing else?" Artemisia asks, and she's trying for casual but the gleam in her eyes is immediate and impossible to hide. "For fifteen minutes? The trainers always told us to diversify."

Lyme raises both her eyebrows and stares her down. "Are you telling me you can't make swords interesting for fifteen minutes?" she asks. "Because I'm pretty sure the girl I chose to win can do just that."

Artemisia flips a grape into the air with her thumb and catches it between her teeth. "Done and done," she says, and gives Lyme an appreciative glance.

 

* * *

 

She scores an eleven. Jasper, who thirty seconds ago was happy enough with his ten, turns to her with a dark scowl. "What did you do?" he demands.

Artemisia just shrugs and leans back against the couch cushions. "I showed them what I'm good at," she says, and she catches Lyme's eye and shutters one eyelid closed in the briefest of winks. Callista takes her boy down to the training room to blow off steam, and Lyme gives Artemisia a thumbs up.

The boy from Six nets himself an eight, and Artemisia makes a face. "He probably showed them a list of baby names and asked them to help him pick one, or something stupid like that," she says dismissively. "Or maybe he picked up heavy things and put them down, I hear that's all the rage in the factories."

"Hey," Lyme says sharply. "You know what you're not going to do, walk in there underestimating everyone and assuming they're all just going to lie down and die for you. Okay? He scored an eight, and you don't get those by telling stories about your girl back home. He's skilled enough they think he has a chance, so don't get so cocky some brain-dead morph-head takes you out."

Artemisia slinks down until she's all but swallowed by the couch cushions. "Fine," she says mulishly, but Lyme is her mentor, not her friend, not yet. "You're no fun."

"You got the highest score of the year and you're just going to whine about it?" Lyme challenges, and Artemisia's eyes flash but she sits back up. "That's what I thought. Take the night off, get your head settled. Interviews are coming and we're going to lose a lot of hours to Remake."

Artemisia salutes, albeit sarcastically, and saunters away into her room. Lyme shoots Brutus a dagger glare. "Don't."

"Didn't say nothin'," he says diplomatically, and Lyme whips a couch cushion at his head anyway.

 

* * *

 

Two years ago, the space between the interviews and falling asleep on that final night drove Lyme out of her room to talk with Nero. He'd made her hot chocolate and told her he believed in her, and Lyme might have spent the first months of her recovery alternately clinging to him and wishing he'd fall off a cliff but that night his words had struck a chord.

She's not -- expecting anything like that with Artemesia, exactly. It's just that the last night is when any doubts the tributes might have will surface. It's not just her, it was right there in the training manual, and the mentors are supposed to be prepared to assuage their kids' doubts and put their minds at ease, set them back on the path to Victory. If it happens Lyme will be ready, that's all.

Lyme settles herself on the sofa in the common area with a stack of sponsor paperwork in her lap, going over the agreements and the promises and the maybe-laters. Many of them are in the 'call me once she's killed five' camp, which is annoying, but if any tributes are likely to miss the Career benchmark of seven, it's not going to be her girl. Lyme goes over the files until the numbers swim in her head, but Artemisia doesn't leave her bedroom. She's nodding off and about to give it up and go to bed when the door cracks open and Artemisia pads out, barefoot and yawning in her Capitol pyjamas.

"I'm just getting a drink of water, if that's okay with you," Artemisia says from behind her hand, and Lyme nods. She's scrubbed off her makeup and has her hair pulled back in a braid, and she yawns again as the water gurgles into a tall glass, blinking sleepily. She looks young, her trademark crazed grin replaced by the normal bemusement at being awake at weird hours, and it hits Lyme right in the chest.

"How you doing?" Lyme risks when Artemisia wanders back, rubbing at her eyes with one hand.

"Fine," Artemisia says. "Not having a crisis of conscience or anything, so you don't have to pretend to bond with me so I get my head on straight." Lyme's mouth thins but she says nothing. "See you in the morning."

Lyme waits another half an hour just to be sure, then she gathers up her work and heads to bed, a hollow dread settling in the pit of her stomach. There are a million and one reasons she wants Artemisia to win, but floating to the top at this moment is that if she doesn't, the image of Artemisia yawning in her oversized t-shirt and sleep pants, looking like an ordinary teenager instead of a killer, will stick behind Lyme's eyelids for the rest of her life.

What did Nero see when he looked at her that last night two years ago? Lyme chases the thought away and pulls the pillow over her head.

 

 


	2. The Arena, Part I - We're All Mad Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Lyme's mouth tightens and she turns away, hurrying down the corridor. Maybe if she walks fast enough she'll outrun Phillips laying a hand on the image of his boy's head._
> 
> The Arena goes live and the stakes are high. Just like with the Games themselves, training for mentoring and actually doing it are two very different animals.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Arena was only meant to be on chapter, but then it exploded, so have even more details!

When she sits down in her chair at mentor central, Lyme can't stop the idiotic thought that she expected everything to be bigger. There's a fuzzy maybe-memory in the back of her mind of sitting at the kitchen table, propped up by a stack of books on her chair but still barely tall enough to see over the top. It's stupid but she'd half expected the consoles to be the same, the screen too high for her to reach, the headset sliding comically down over her ears like an oversized hat.

But no, the chair fits her fine -- a little small, almost -- and the keyboard sits dead even with the centre of her torso. There's even a mug for coffee or booze or whatever her poison of choice might be, sitting at the corner of her station and made for her big, broad District 2 hands. Brutus settles down in the chair next to her, and Lyme lets the strange thoughts skitter away.

The lights go up on the Arena. It's a ruined cityscape; the Gamemakers like that one, returning to it every decade or so. Broken pipes lie exposed in the streets, trickling water down the cracked paving stones, and that's a good sign in an environment without natural streams or vegetation except -- maybe not, not this year.

Last month Lyme met a Gamemaker's son at a party, took him home and fucked him in her Capitol apartment. She tied him down and worked him over until he begged her to let him come, but Lyme just fisted her hand in his hair and told him not unless he gave her a secret. He'd gasped out that she should expect to pay a lot of water this year, and Lyme let him finish and stroked his hair and drugged the glass of water she brought him so in the morning he'd remember nothing but a happy daze.

There's no reason to pay for water when the Arena is full of it, except -- oh, fuck.

Lyme hits her console while the countdown is still running, paging through the lists of supplies and tallying them against her initial sponsor reserves. It's not a lot -- she's a first-year mentor, not too much brand loyalty from the get-go -- but it's enough for a bottle of water. Brutus touches her arm and makes a hand signal, and Lyme is still learning the Two mentor-signs but she knows that one well enough: _What are you doing?_

She holds up one hand, palm out and fingers raised.  _Wait._

Brutus frowns, but advantage is everything, and the less the other mentors notice, the better. By now the countdown is in the final five seconds, and Artemisia has her eyes on the Cornucopia, knees bent and posture leaning forward as she readies to run. The gong sounds -- Artemisia dashes without waiting, and Lyme's breath turns hot and painful in her chest because that's what they were taught but she would've died her year if she had, what if there are mines this year too -- but then it's fine, they're clear. Artemisia reaches the mouth of the horn and grabs the nearest sword, spinning and slicing it straight across the chest of the Seven boy who went for a pack at the edge of the pile.

Six, meanwhile, grabs a knapsack from the perimeter, then carries the little boy from Ten past the danger zone before saluting and disappearing into the gap between two buildings. Lyme puts him out of her mind.

Artemisia takes out two more by the time the last of the outlying tributes have either died or fled, and she jogs back to the supplies to meet the rest of the Careers. 

"There's plenty of water, at least," says Four Boy, glancing around. "We should take a drink and then wash off the blood before it starts stinking. Nothing like guts in the sun."

"You'd know, fisher boy," snickers the One girl, and her district partner gives her an appreciative snort.

Lyme's fingers hover over the button to summon the water canister, except how is she going to do it? Mentors are allowed to give their tributes hints, but there's a line, and she was never clear in training where it was. The last thing she wants to do is mark Artemisia for death by giving her a suggestion too soon.

Artemisia holds up a hand. "Wait," she says, voice sharpening, and Lyme lowers her hand. "Wait, there's something here, it looks like a camp stove."

"So?" Jasper nudges her out of the way and pokes at it with his foot. 

"All the food in here is ready to eat rations," Artemisia says, rolling her eyes. "Are you going to boil your jerky, I don't think so. I think it's for the water."

Four Girl narrows her eyes, and she stalks the field for any tributes who are bleeding out but not dead. She finds one, the girl from Eleven, wide-eyed and gasping, and drags her over to one of the water pipes. "Have a drink," she says, and kicks the pipe with her foot until water runs over Eleven's face and into her mouth.

In less than a minute Eleven is dead, her lips purple and eyes bloodshot, throat bleeding from her fingernails as she clawed at her neck when her windpipe closed. "Shit," says Four Girl. "Okay guys, don't drink the water. Dammit."

Artemisia runs a hand through her hair, untangling the strands matted with the other tributes' blood. "Didn't burn her skin, so we're probably fine to wash with it as long as we keep it away from wounds," she says.

"She's smart," Brutus says with grudging approval. "That's good."

Lyme could snap at him that of course she's smart, she's brilliant and amazing, but keeps her mouth shut. Onscreen, Artemisia squabbles with One Boy over who gets custody of the only bottle of water found in the Cornucopia, while the others roll their eyes and sort through the packs as the cannons begin to fire.

 

* * *

 

That night, the Pack settle in around the campfire, arguing amiably over supplies and teasing each other for sloppy technique or exaggerated showing off in their earlier fights. The Four boy, a non-Volunteer eighteen-year-old named Luca who's a little saner and a little more disturbed by casual talk of carnage than the others, steps away from the fire to check his weapons, sitting on a pile of rubble and sharpening the tip of his harpoon.

Artemisia strolls over, hands in her pockets, and she's scrubbed the blood from her skin but a few patches remain on the side of her neck and under her fingernails. "Hey," she says. "Not gonna join the party?" 

"I'm a little partied out after all that excitement," Luca says dryly, and it's a good mix of gallows humour with a touch of self-deprecation that works for Four but rarely for the other Careers. "You guys have fun." 

Artemisia rocks back on her heels, then she reaches down and takes the harpoon, laying it aside. Four has just opened his mouth to protest when she slides sideways into his lap, presses him back against the broken concrete wall and kisses him full on the mouth. "You looked good out there," she says, sliding one hand up into his hair and curling the other lightly around his throat.

Four's pupils are blown and a flush invades his golden-tanned skin, and he grabs her hard around the waist and kisses back. 

The main feed going out to the districts is angled best to catch the action, showing two kids so overcome by adrenaline and lust that they just can't help themselves, but Lyme cycles through the various cameras available to her console. And yeah, there it is -- even as Artemisia arches her spine into Four's touch and drags her nails across his scalp, her fingers twitch to check the positions of her wrist-sheathed knives, and every few seconds she slits one eye open toward the rest of the pack. It's an unnecessary precaution this soon in the game but it's a good sign that she's not getting complacent. 

"Save some for tomorrow," calls out Skye, the male tribute from One, picking up a pebble of asphalt and lobbing it at them. 

It hits Artemisia in the shoulder, and she leans back and grins at him, slow and obscene with the dancing firelight turning her face into something from a nightmare. "Good point," Artemisia says, getting to her feet and patting Luca on the cheek. "You assholes better not have eaten all the canned pears." 

"Hey Luca, why don't you stand up and get us some more water?" One Girl guffaws, and Luca glares at her but doesn't move from his spot.

"I'm up for an orgy if you guys are jealous," Artemisia says, sprawling on her side by the fire and stretching out to show off her lanky frame to its best advantage. She's built lithe and boyish with none of Camphor from One's stunning curves, but she knows how to work what she has.

It's a testament to the Centre and its three years of intensive image training that the Pack actually exchanges furtive glances before Jasper snorts and tosses a crumpled newspaper onto the fire. "You're all perverts," he scoffs, and fields the accusing HEY! tossed at him by half the others by flinging up a rude gesture. 

"Just because we don't get hard-ons at the sight of blood," Artemisia shoots back. Jasper aims a half-hearted kick at her, she pulls a face at him, but then the anthem sounds in preparation for the parade of the fallen. "Keep your hands out of your pants, speaking of sick," she says to Jasper, voice tinged with mocking. "Have respect for the dead."

"Oh, I'll have  _respect_ all right --"

"Shut up!" Four Girl snaps. She goes by Lyssa, and the sponsors already keep fumbling her and Luca's names. "It's starting." 

Not even Jasper will talk through the parade, and they fall silent and tilt their heads up to watch the faces of the dead.

 

* * *

 

After the anthem, the Careers play five-finger fillet to see who stays behind with the supplies while the others take the first hunt. Lyssa's knife slips first, and she sighs and flings it down on the ground; the others cackle as she sticks her bleeding finger in her mouth. "Fine, fine," she grouses around her knuckle. "Bring me back something good if you find anything." Jasper grins, and she drops her hand, shaking it out and examining the cut. "And not a scalp or a body part, all right, don't be gross."

"I like to call it 'creative'," he says, picking up a sword with a curved, serrated blade and strapping it around his waist.

"Your boy is quite the charmer," calls over Dexter, this year's male mentor from One, and Callista smiles and inclines her head, swooping her hand out in an elaborate bow.

Brutus touches Lyme's shoulder. "You're gonna want to go down to the floor," he says in a low voice, and Lyme swallows a protest because she can't chase the fear that someone will run Artemisia through as soon as she turns her back on the screens. It's ridiculously unfounded on the first day, but still, stranger things. "This is the best time to get used to the sponsor den. Your girl's got three kills and they'll be hunting for another all night. Now's the time to lock in deals for later, when everyone's hopped up on the blood."

"They're also nicely intoxicated to celebrate a successful opening day," Callista adds, having wheeled her chair over without Lyme noticing. "He's right, this is a good inauguration for you."

Lyme frowns. "You're not coming?" she asks, since Callista is making no move to get up from her chair, instead popping one of her special mints into her mouth.

"My dear girl, I look at the sponsors and they practically murder each other in their attempts to throw money at me," Callista says airily, and in the background one of the outlying mentors gives them all a disgusted glare before turning back to his console. "I don't need the advantage, so you go and I'll watch the screens."

"I'm gonna grab a couple hours of sleep," Brutus says, and Lyme wouldn't have expected that from him except she learned about staggering shifts in training. Apparently regulation trumps Brutus' workaholic tendencies, at least sometimes. "Sucks to have graveyard your first night, but this is the best time for you to wrangle out a few promises."

Callista nods. "It also won't matter if you fail today, since the tributes aren't in need. You don't want your first attempt to be desperate." 

Lyme nods. She'll be in the sponsor den all on her own, and Lyme has played the flirting game with them at parties before with neither side actually saying out loud what they're really discussing, but those were parties. Practice.

Nobody wins the Games from the platform, as they say, and Lyme nods. "All right," she says, and she leaves her headset on her console and exchanges it for the earpiece mentors wear while in the ring so their partner can contact them in case of emergencies. 

"I'll contact you when they settle down, and then we can sleep," Callista says, which usually is around four. The Careers tend to hunt at night and rest through the pre-dawn and into the morning.

Brutus claps Lyme on the shoulder on his way out, and Lyme pauses in the doorway to glance back into the room. Most of the seats are empty; the mentors whose districts disqualified in the bloodbath have left, to sleep or drink or shoot up or whatever they do, and Lyme hopes she never, ever has to know. Others have slipped out to catch a nap while their tributes sleep. Callista leans back in her chair and draws a slim knife from nowhere, using it to shape the edges of her already perfect nails, and the Ones are watching the screens and commenting on the Pack's mandatory for-the-cameras banter.

The exception is Phillips, from Six, whose girl is dead and whose boy is sound asleep, curled up on the roof of a building far away from the Pack's current hunting grounds. Phillips sits rigid in his chair, hands curled around a mug of coffee large enough to brain someone with, ignoring the entire room. As Lyme watches he lifts one hand and presses his fingertips to the screen. 

Lyme's mouth tightens and she turns away, hurrying down the corridor. Maybe if she walks fast enough she'll outrun Phillips laying a hand on the image of his boy's head.

 

* * *

 

Callista was right about the sponsors. A few of the other mentors are there, drinks in hand and mingling with the flock of brightly-coloured party-goers; most of the Capitol citizens are weaving on their feet, leaning on each other or the Victors and laughing far too loudly at their own terrible jokes. Lyme stops by the bar and orders herself a brandy; the Capitol-preferred vintages tend to be a little cloying and leave her mouth feeling fuzzy, but at least even overenthusiastic Capitolians tend to recognize it's meant to be drunk slowly. At her Victory Tour Nero had to half-carry Lyme back to her room after too many fizzy pink drinks were pressed into her hands. Turns out tasting like shitty fruit mixed with fairy farts doesn't stop something from being blindingly alcoholic out here.

Brandy is also not something a twenty-year-old usually orders, and right now, surrounded by veterans, the last thing Lyme wants them to remember is that she's only two years older than the girl she's trying to save. 

Lyme has never liked people as a group; she mostly stayed away from the other kids at the Centre to focus on her training, and now in the Village she's still getting used to living with a bunch of other people that she doesn't actually hate or even prefer to ignore. Sponsors on the other hand are everything Lyme can't stand about humanity; they're loud, pushy, demanding and entitled, as well as stupid and frivolous with no connection to the real world or how life actually works. But these people, like it or not, saved her life, and any tribute she manages to pull will owe the same debt. Lyme puts on her best smile -- charming with a hint of danger -- and wades in.

The good news is, initial investment in Artemisia is high. Her nonchalance and laid-back attitude at the Reaping didn't earn her any favours in the pre-Arena polls, but her showing from the moment the countdown finished have put her near the top. Jasper, with his outright bloodlust and irreverence to life and decency and taste, has first place, but Lyme isn't worried about that, not yet.

Callista, historically, has done exactly what Lyme and Brutus feared this year: she chooses the villains for someone else's hero to defeat. Jasper has started too high, built his bar of crazy at a level where his most outrageous today will be commonplace tomorrow. Lyme's advisors drilled this into her in training, just like the trainers did when she was on the other side of the Arena forcefield; always leave room to build. Jasper started his Games from the top of the cliff, and there's nowhere to go but a long, hard fall to the bottom. 

Jasper isn't the worry, from a sponsor perspective; he'll flame out, and Artemisia will outlast him. Six, though. Phillips' boy has nothing but potential, and the ties back home give him a context that Artemisia can't match. No Career can, since the Centre is their family and officially the Centre doesn't exist. No manufactured anecdotes will compare to Six and his bright-eyed, wistful smiles as he talked about the day he and Freddy (short for Winifred) kissed for the first time in the pouring rain. 

Capitol citizens can be incredibly romantic for a group of people who sit around eating popcorn as children bleed to death in high definition. 

"It was just such a beautiful story," says a blue-skinned woman whose name Lyme has instantly forgotten, and she secretly prays she won't be asked to repeat it. Lyme has files on all of them but after a while they bleed together. "I cried in his interviews, you know, when he gave that message to his future son? So incredibly touching! I'm sure that footage will be a family heirloom for years to come." 

(Lyme had watched Six's interview backstage -- he'd proposed to Freddy from the stage, promised to buy her a ring with his winnings, then told their unborn baby he was proud -- and imagined the influx of sponsor funds over a bunch of sentimental drivel. Onstage Artemisia had kept her Career mask, a careful blend of boredom and mild scoffing, but backstage afterward she'd snarled and skewered a chair with her high-heeled shoe. "For fuck's sake," Artemisia had said, carving a stick figure into the upholstery and then slicing it straight through the middle, "I could talk about all the imaginary babies I'm going to have, how the fuck is that supposed to help?")

Now, Lyme nods and affects an expression of understanding. "It is very touching," she says. "I'm sure you're not the only one who feels that way. But these aren't the Feelings Games. They're not the Hugging Games. If this were a competition to see who could make the most people cry, then yes, Six would have the advantage, but it's not. These are the Hunger Games. It's not enough to have a reason to win, the tributes have to show they have the ability to do it. Artemisia can bring it home, and you don't have to watch her for more than a few minutes to get that." 

The woman purses her lips, though her forehead doesn't move because she's altered it to remove the ability to wrinkle. "Are you sure you're giving the boy enough credit? You never know, those outlying districts can be quite resourceful. He could be holding something back, waiting to surprise us."

"That's what mentors say when they know they've got nothing," Lyme says bluntly. It's not exactly true -- tributes have come from behind at the last minute to win with a secret skill or hidden talent, like Beetee Latier and his electricity death trap -- but statistically it's not likely. "Maybe in two weeks he'll surprise everyone and do something exciting, I'm not saying I can tell the future. But just think back to your favourite Games, your favourite moments." She pauses for emphasis. "Your favourite  _Victors_ . Chances are they're not the ones who hid for weeks. They're the ones who showed everyone what they could do right from the start and never let you down."

"Hm," she says, tilting her head to one side, and for the first time a flash of shrewdness filters through the gossamer. Sponsors, Lyme's instructors drilled into her, are people with money, and no matter how they spend it, they always want to know it's worth it. They're not rich because they throw everything away on the first tribute they're asked to represent. "I suppose you have a point, but you get so many sponsors already, you know. I like to feel like my contribution is making a difference."

Lyme inhales a breath and holds it halfway, letting the building pressure in her head ground her. "So wait," she says. "Don't donate now. Let's give it five days; if Six hasn't done anything interesting -- he hasn't killed anyone, he hasn't shown any hidden talents -- then you sponsor Artemisia. If he does, then I'll be happy to admit that there's more to Six than he's showing."

The woman nods. "I will agree to that," she says, and she reaches into her purse -- shaped like one of the carnivorous squirrel mutts from the 50th, why for the love of rocks and mountains would anyone do that -- and pulls out her electronic thumbprint. Lyme hands her the device she carries that acts as her personal sponsor bank, and the woman keys in her donation, the timeframe, and seals it with her key. "Five days. We shall see." 

Lyme smiles and presses the woman's hand, dialling back her strength so she barely grasps the soft, polished fingers rather than crushing them in a show of dominance like she was taught back at the Centre. "I hope we can be friends," she says. Never call it 'doing business' or the sponsors will treat it just as impersonally, her training module said. Build relationships. Make connections.

This time the woman smiles and inclines her head. "I hope so too," she says, then drifts away toward the tray of sugared desserts. 

'Maybe' is not a 'yes', but at least it's something. All Six has to do is stay quiet for five days, and as far as the numbers go, dark horse outliers tend to lie low for the first week. Statistically it's a good shot.

There's a knot of younger men in the corner of the room, throwing darts haphazardly at a board, and Lyme rolls her shoulders, shaking off her polite negotiator mode and putting herself into her competitive headspace. Young men are stupid, they like to gamble, and Lyme isn't pretty enough that beating them will be seen as an affront to their masculinity. She can at least wrangle a tinderbox or anti-venom kit out of winning a competition.

Young men also don't drink brandy, and so Lyme abandons her drink at the corner and snags a bottle of beer. She lets her stance loosen and saunters up to the group. "Hey boys," she calls out, flashing them a sharp smile. "What'll you give me if I hit ten in a row?"

 

* * *

 

Two tributes -- the boy from Ten that Six carried to safety, and the girl from Five -- die the second day from drinking the poisoned water. By now the other mentors have sent water or a boiling pot or at least some kind of hint, and the remaining tributes know to stay away. The next day the Pack runs into the girl from Eight, and she's used to both the environment and casually starving enough that she made it past the second-day hump, but that isn't enough to save her. Artemisia takes the kill, bringing her total up to four, and the resulting feast from the sponsors placates Jasper when he complains that she didn't let him slice the girl up first.

"If you fuck how you fight, remind me to be glad we never did it," Artemisia says, licking a spot of lamb stew from the side of her thumb. "I'd probably fall asleep by the time you were done."

"Oh, really?" Jasper takes it in good humour, for him, which means skewering a piece of meat on the end of his dagger and eating it that way. Callista pinches the bridge of her nose and mutters something about  _manners_ . "I thought girls were supposed to like it better when it's not over in two minutes." 

"Maybe he takes so long to kill because he's compensating," Camphor hypothesizes, shooting Artemisia a knowing grin that's impressively filthy given rumours that all female tributes from One have to be virgins going in. "Though if we're talking about compensating, maybe we should be looking at Luca and his spears." 

They all eye the Four boy critically, and he rolls his eyes and takes another helping of stew while saying  _no comment_ . Artemisia just winks and says she has a pretty good idea, making him splutter on his next bite and spill all over himself.

Lyme's year, she was the butt of most of the sexual banter that the Pack is all but obligated to participate in. Her group had been a little less fake-friendly than this one, the Ones obviously in it to kill the other rather than providing a unified front, and she'd sat stone-faced through joke after joke about how her physique and looks and style obviously meant she went for women. When she had enough she'd made it stop, and as pack leader they'd listened to her even if they still shot jibes under their breath.

Artemisia walks the line well, kidding Jasper without undermining his authority as the one who gives the orders for the Careers, sticking him without turning all his wrath on her. At the end of the night she drops into Luca's lap again, and they kiss with his blade pressed against her ribs and hers pointed at his throat. This time both of them angle themselves for the cameras.

Brutus made out with the One girl his year, and Lyme has not and will never ask him if he's glad an earthquake took her out and he didn't have to kill her.

 

* * *

 

On Day Seven, there's what the live commentators like to call an 'upset'; at the recap they'll tease viewers with the promise of an  _exciting turn of events_ . The girl from Nine, quiet and sullen in her interviews, spends the early morning hours using a self-rigged pulley system to haul an enormous block of concrete up onto the roof above where the Career Pack is sleeping. They're just starting to stir when she pushes the chunk of stone over the edge, where it lands on Four's Lyssa and splatters her skull before she ever wakes.

The noise wakes the others before the cannon sounds, but Nine Girl dodges Luca's spear and scrambles away over the rooftops, disappearing into the maze of alleyways before the others can follow.

"Shit," mutters Skye, and he takes a few steps back and tosses his sword from hand to hand in a twitchy gesture. "Shit, that sucks. Do you think we should --" He waves one hand at the mess.

"It'll just look worse if we try to move anything," says his district partner. "She's from Four, she's got family watching. Let's don't." 

Even Jasper licks his lips in distaste, hopping out of the way to avoid the growing puddle of blood. "What a coward way to off somebody, dropping a fucking rock. I hate outliers." 

Artemisia just shrugs and shoulders her pack, lashing her sword to her waist. "They can't collect her if we're still here," she says. "We should get out of the way and let them take her." 

They move out and watch the hovercraft descend from a distance. Once it disappears back up into the sky, Luca grits his teeth and hefts his spear. "You guys go ahead," he says. "I've got something I need to do."

Skye punches him in the arm. "Good hunting," he says, and Artemisia tosses a bag of dried fruit at Luca as he passes.

"Think he'll get her?" Camphor muses, watching them as he heads around a corner.

Artemisia makes a knife appear and disappear, flipping it between her fingers before hiding it in her jacket sleeve. "Bet you an apple he's back before tomorrow sunset."

 

* * *

 

A cannon goes off the next afternoon, and Luca finds the Pack a few hours later as they're playing cards while waiting for the water to boil. "Deal me in," he says, dropping to the ground between Artemisia and Camphor.

"Is it done?" Skye asks, sliding over the cards.

"It's done," Luca says, and picks up his hand without another word.

Camphor fishes an apple out of her bag and tosses it over his head to Artemisia, who takes a triumphant bite before offering to Luca. He shakes his head, and she shrugs and eats the rest of it herself.

 

* * *

 

Ten days in, the Pack runs into the thirteen-year-old from Twelve, a stick-thin boy who only managed to escape the bloodbath because all the Careers were busy killing someone else. The boy is hollow-eyed and skeletal, lips cracked and white and eyes rimmed with red from dehydration; unlike the others, he'd survived by sipping just enough of the toxic water to keep himself alive without being poisoned. Desperate, he'd tried to sneak into the Cornucopia to steal the Pack's canteen. 

"Dibs," Jasper calls out, and before any of the others can complain, he hurls his knife through the air and catches the boy right in the stomach.

"You know that 'dibs' aren't actually a real thing," Artemisia says, hauling out the camp stove and gesturing at Camphor to bring over a pail of water. "We're not five."

"Okay then, in this case 'dibs' means 'if any of you touch him I'll peel your fucking eyes out'," Jasper says, cheerfully enough, and the others exchange rolled eyes behind his back.

Lyme barely registers the conversation, and the viewing figures show that the audience isn't paying attention, either. Most of the Capitol are tuned into the Six feed, where the boy has crammed himself into the mouth of a giant sewer pipe high enough off the ground that he can rest without worrying about being killed before the sound of approach wakes him up. He's talking to his girl, and Lyme refuses to switch on the audio but his expression is wistful, a soft smile playing on his face. It doesn't matter what he's saying; what matters is that support for him is climbing, and he's still alive after this long despite having no kills to his name. 

If Six wins, desperate tributes will be pretending for years to have a baby back home in an attempt to cash in on the sympathy. Except he won't win, he can't, and Lyme turns her attention back to Artemisia and her crew.

She'd sent a sign this morning, when the Pack split up for more effective hunting before returning to the Cornucopia to regroup. Lyme used a massive chunk of funds earned from hours upon hours wrangling on the sponsor floor in order to buy Artemisia a bottle of water. Not just the standard canister but one with a built-in purification system, and a strip on the inside that measured the current effectiveness of the filter.

Artemisia took it and slipped it into her pack without even a flicker of recognition, and Lyme hoped her message went through. Now, they all sit in a ring around the fire, exchanging irritated glances as the boy from Twelve continues to whimper at the perimeter of their camp. Luca from Four looks particularly rattled, curling his fingers into fists with every blood-choked cry, and Artemisia reaches over and squeezes his hand.

It's a reassuring gesture that's entirely out of character for the persona she's been playing, and Lyme very carefully does not hold her breath. 

They eat mostly in silence, poking at their rations with disinterest since the money for special treats dried up a few days ago. Each time the Twelve boy subsides Jasper leans over and pokes him, bringing him out of his pain-overload daze, and by the time they've finished their meal and are setting up camp and the cannon still hasn't fired, the rest of the Pack wears identical expressions of impatience.

Artemisia breaks the silence. She flings down her bedroll and plants her hands on her hips. "Jasper, if you don't end it, I will," she snaps.

"You just try it, bitch," Jasper snarls, striding over and putting herself in her space, knife bared and gleaming in the firelight. "This one's mine and I'll do him how I want. You stay out of it." 

Artemisia narrows her eyes, but he's in between her and the Twelve and his knife is pointed squarely at her gut. "Well I wish someone would just kill him, anyway," she says, her tone turning petulant, almost whining. "I'm tired and I want to sleep, and I can't with the meat crying into my ear all night." 

Jasper sneers at her about how to him it's like a lullaby so she may as well suck it, but then behind him, Luca glides to his feet and draws his dagger as the Ones pretend not to notice. He kneels by the boy from Twelve, covers his mouth and nose with one hand and slits his throat in a smooth, practiced motion.

The cannon fires, and Jasper whirls around, hands now bristling with knives. "The fuck?" he shouts, and Artemisia scrambles back and away, snatching up her pack and shoving a few packages of dried meat and fruit into it while the others turn to watch the action. "You asshole, that was  _mine!_ You kill-stealing shark-fucking son of a fishwife --"

Luca launches himself at Jasper as the Ones leap to their feet and grab their weapons. Artemisia, meanwhile, has flung her pack over her shoulders and taken off running, muttering 'shit shit shit  _shit_ ' in a carefully-panicked undertone, looking for all the world like she didn't just orchestrate the whole thing. Lyme's chest swells with pride as her girl widens the distance between her and the Pack until none of them will be able to catch her tonight, even with a direct trail.

Back at the campfire, Luca discovers that whatever training he got at the Athletic Club in his home district is no match for a Two with a head stuffed full of crazy and a taste for blood that was interrupted before it could be slaked. Within minutes Luca has gone from taking on Jasper full-on to scrabbling to defend himself, and at last he throws himself out of reach and takes off running.

"Coward!" Jasper yells after him, eyes wide and mouth flecked with foam, just as the Ones appear behind him and drive their blades straight through his back.

Callista clicks her teeth and lays her headset down on her console as the cannon booms. Jasper collapses in a heap, blood pooling from the twin wounds and mingling with the dusty cement. "Sloppy," she says, her voice calm and even just like the line indicating Jasper's lack of vitals. "Leaving himself wide open like that, he knew better."

Onscreen the Ones drag the bodies out of the way, then return to the camp, laughing as they pick through the bounty that now belongs only to them. "Suckers," Camphor says, delighted, and she tosses her district partner an apple that's only slightly bruised. "Twos, man, bunch of volatile monkeys."

"Did you see how the girl took off as soon as it got messy?" Skye takes a bite of his apple, teeth cutting through the skin in a savage motion. "So much for famous District 2 courage." 

Camphor shrugs. "Told you she was all talk, but now she'll see. We've got all the supplies, and she doesn't even have water. We might not even have to kill her." 

Lyme runs a hand through her hair, unsurprised when her fingers come back slick with sweat.

 

* * *

 

That night, something else happens over on the private Six feed, accessible only by the Gamemakers and Phillips at his personal console. Whatever it is, they've decided it's too much for the public channel, and Phillips sucks in hard, wet breaths and fists both hands in his hair. That means a breakdown, and not the pretty, camera-ready ones that fill the audiences with glee and have them reaching for their snacks. It'll be the desperate kind, the kind that might make people stop and consider for a moment that these are just kids who are tired and scared and want to go home. They enjoy the spectacle; not so much the messy, snot-smeared moments that bring reality into focus.

"Shit," Brutus mutters. "This ain't right, I'm gonna let him sleep."

Lyme gives him a sharp look. They help each other out, sure, but Careers don't offer to take shifts for outlying mentors. That's page one in the manual. "You're going soft now?"

Brutus just waves a hand at Phillips, sitting with his head in his hands as the public feed flickers back on, his boy curled into a ball in his hiding place and twitching in a restless sleep. Brutus and Phillips are the same age and came out a year apart, and maybe it's a macho man bonding thing, Lyme will never understand. "It's not like it'll hurt our girl to let Phillips get some shut-eye. The kids all separated and they'll be looking for a place to hunker down and figure out what they're doing. Nothing's happening tonight."

Lyme would argue, but Brutus has his jaw set and his eyebrows furrowed so there's no point. Pacing-wise it wouldn't make sense for the Gamemakers to flood the Arena or send in a pack of mutts tonight, not after two kills in short succession. If Brutus is going to go all noble and stupid over a man who's only in this chair night after night because his fellow mentors are out sticking needles in their skin and can't be trusted not to spend out their sponsor reserves on candy and face paints, well, tonight's the night to do it. He'll get reprimanded if Games Command finds out -- you do not help the competition, ever -- and it's not Lyme's problem.

Brutus ambles over and clasps Phillips' shoulder, and Lyme doesn't bother to watch the exchange. On the Two feed, Artemisia has found herself a building to hole up in for the night, and she goes through her supplies with a determined expression. 

"It doesn't make you better," says a voice from across the room, and Lyme whirls to see the male mentor from Ten -- what's his name, Edward, no, Edwin -- staring out at them with narrowed eyes. He's driven Lyme half to distraction all week by drumming two pencils against the console every time he concentrates, and now his face is set in an ugly mask. "You make me sick. You think you're so noble, letting him sleep, when you're all just murderers, and so are your little monsters."

Brutus says nothing, doesn't even move from his spot in Phillips' chair with his back to the room. Lyme would love to start a fight but she's not that stupid, not when that's a one-way ticket to her getting banned from the premises, and so she deliberately turns away and goes back to her station.

Dexter, at Lyme's left, lets out a loud, conspicuous snort. "Right," he drawls, rolling his eyes companionably at Lyme. "Takes one to know one, you hypocritical fuck."

Edwin's chair creaks as he flings himself out of it, and Dexter rises with deliberate, deadly grace, a manic grin twitching on his face. "Oh for fuck's sake," Brutus mutters from across the room, but he's not the reason they back down.

That reason is Mags, whose staccato "Enough!" cuts through the room like a gunshot. Both men startle, and she's half their size and over twice their age and doesn't stand or even bother to look at them, but they sit down. The tension in the room dissipates, replaced by an awkward hum of apology. 

Mags doesn't bother to lecture after that, just shakes her head ever so slightly as she scrolls through pages of information on her console.

"Well this was entertaining," Callista says in a mild tone. "Lyme, I'll take over for you in the morning shift."

"Yeah," Lyme says. She's too keyed up to sleep anyway.

Callista glides away, and Dexter glances over. "She's going to go knife someone in an alley," he says at a volume too low for Edwin to hear, and Lyme blinks at him. "She took me out when both of ours went out in the volcano back in the Quell. She does it whenever her kids lose. Doesn't kill him, says she promised her mentor she wouldn't, but it's damn close."

Lyme turns back to stare at the door that Callista exited through. "Oh," she says, sounding like an idiot, but what else is there to say? She's lived in the same village as Callista for two years and didn't know that. Snow only knows what else about her fellow Victors would come as a surprise.

"Yeah, not everyone gets smashed," Dexter says, leaning back and stretching his arms over his head until his joints pop. "You'll get to know everyone's quirks soon enough." 

Lyme nods and tugs her headset back on over her ears, and she immerses herself in the real-time polling data now flooding the charts to stop herself from wondering what, in ten years, they'll be whispering to the baby mentors about her. 

Onscreen, Artemisia settles in for the night, keeping her bag with the precious water bottle tucked in against her side.

 

 


	3. Arrogance and Brutality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"So how good are they? Pretty good, they win it almost every year. But they can be arrogant, and arrogance can be a big problem." - Haymitch Abernathy_
> 
> The Final Six.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is late, but I was at azelmaroark's wedding on the weekend so I'm a bit behind. Since she's the reason any of my Hunger Games stuff exists in the first place, I hope y'all can forgive me! :)

The Games trainers like to scare the incoming kids with statistics about exposure and dehydration to get them to check the survival stations, but really, by the numbers that's not what does most of the tributes in. Exposure rarely kills on its own because years poll badly with Capitol viewers when too many deaths are non-combat-related. A tribute might be starving, but nine times out of ten it's someone else's knife or sword or axe or rock that actually sounds the cannon.

The near miss with Jasper, followed by two days without food or water, strip the last of the prettiness away from Mags' boy Luca. By the time Artemisia runs into him at sundown on the twelfth day he's stopped bothering to move or even cover his tracks, sitting dead on a broken half-wall to the side of the street. Lyme doesn't need access to his vitals to know he's only a few days from critical condition; mentally he looks already there.

He barely lifts his head when she finds him. His hair glints in the falling light, and Artemisia jogs over and stops in front of him. "Hey," she says, her sword balanced one one shoulder. A few days ago she was pressing him up against buildings and kissing him while the others catcalled, but now she only nudges him with her foot. "Are you gonna fight me, or what?"

Luca leans back on his hands, tipping his head back to look at the sky. It leaves his throat bare and open, but Artemisia waits. "I miss the water," he says, to her or to the cameras or maybe to no one at all, who knows. "Do you know what it's like? Water is everything in Four. We lived on the coast, my mom and me, I've never gone a day without seeing the ocean until the Reaping. Here there's nothing, just buildings and concrete and dirt everywhere. The only water here is from the sewers and it's full of poison." He rubs a hand over his face. "A lot of times Arenas had a lake. I think I could've done it if there was a lake. It's not salt water but it'd be better than this."

Artemisia still says nothing, and she sits down on the wall beside him with her sword held ready in her hand. "I'd murder my own grandmother for a shower," she says with feeling.

Luca's mouth twitches. "If she was anything like you, she'd probably murder you first."

"Probably," Artemisia agrees, grinning a little. "I bet she was one tough bitch."

The moment passes as a cloud covers the sun, and shadows creep up the street and envelop them. The camera palate shifts cooler, blues and greys instead of evening orange. Luca shakes his head. "I thought I was prepared," he says. "I wasn't prepared for this. It's not even the killing, it's just -- everything. It's not what I thought it would be."

Artemisia stands up then, sword flashing at her side, and Luca jerks back. "Are you kidding me?" she spits out. "What were you expecting? This isn't what you and your buddies imagined when swinging around driftwood on the beach and playing at being Victors, so now you're gonna cry about it?"

"I'm not crying!" Luca snaps, reaching for his spear, and he might be dehydrated and exhausted but he still trained for this, and he's not out yet. "You don't understand. You're Two, you do what they tell you and don't ever think about it, but I'm not like that. I had a life. I had a _girlfriend_! And now --"

"Oh a girlfriend once, good for you," Artemisia says. "Big deal, I've had five."

Luca stops in the middle of his rant. "What? You have not." 

"Yeah, no, I really have, and that's just the ones I dated. I've got game you can't even imagine." She rests her sword against her hip. "And if you really knew me, you wouldn't spout that shit about me following orders. I do whatever the hell I want." 

Lyme remembers that phase well, recalls watching footage of Brutus and Emory with a glimmer of self-importance because they might have swallowed the Capitol line but she knew better, she was smarter. That didn't last. Onscreen, Luca actually rolls his eyes. "I know you guys all called me precious because I didn't count kills, but you're the worst of them. You think you're free but you're not. You think you can win but you can't, nobody can. You're just doubly sad because you don't see it." 

Artemisia's expression hardens. "Get up," she says. "We do this now."

"What, because I'm right?"

"Because you're a Four and I'm a Two," Artemisia says, stepping back and falling into a fighting stance, sword at the ready. "Oceans and mountains, the oldest things in the world, right? You're not going to die three days from now too dehydrated to cry. Go out with honour and have some fucking district pride!"

"If I'm going to die, what does it matter how it happens?" Luca challenges, but he slides off the wall and hefts his weapon. 

"It matters because it matters," Artemisia says, blunt and straightforward. "You might be having a tantrum but if you think about it, you know I'm right." 

Luca stares at her for a long moment, but then he laughs, a short, disbelieving burst. "Fine, you win," he says, and he raises his spear and charges.

It's a quick fight, since Artemisia doesn't bother to drag it out for the cameras. Exhaustion and the lack of food and water have left Luca shaking and his moves sloppy, but if nothing else he's on his feet and fighting when Artemisia stabs her sword right through him. He drops his spear and staggers back, and Artemisia fists her hand in his shirt and follows him down as he sinks to his knees, the blade still buried in his stomach.

She kisses him one last time -- his hands scrabble against her arms, nails scratching against her skin and leaving long, red welts -- and holds it until she yanks the sword free. 

He's smiling when the crack of the cannon splits the sky, and Lyme knows it's just an illusion caused by violent death and muscle spasms but it looks good on camera; the commentators will be going nuts. Artemisia steps back, retrieves his spear and lays it in his hands. "See," she says, her face a little paler than usual under the Arena dirt, but she holds it together. They were allies, but never friends. "Told you it was better this way." 

Artemisia doesn't wait to watch the hovercraft arrive. In the control room, Mags stands up and leaves the room without a word.

 

* * *

 

The Ones take out the girl from Ten on the first day of the third week when she leaps down on them from an overhang as they cross through the abandoned city square. She nearly takes off Skye's head with an upscaled hunting knife the length of her forearm, but his district partner pushes him out of the way and they both avoid the attack. Ten Girl's eyes blaze with Arena madness -- she's kept herself alive not with water but with the blood from a slaughtered hound muttation -- and she comes at them again, screaming curses and shouting about killing cattle.

Ten is strong but the Ones are stronger, and it doesn't take long, not against two of them. She gets in a few good hits but not enough, and the Ones are bleeding but not staggering when her body slumps to the ground and the cannon booms overhead. The pair move far enough away from her body for the hovercraft to collect it, climbing up to the roof of a nearby building so they can strip off their shirts and tend to each other's wounds.

Two trains for personality and allure, sure, and everyone who graduates knows how to work the camera, but it's nothing on the Ones. They use sliding hands and lingering glances to turn sponging away blood and applying salve and bandages into a teasing show that makes Brutus turn away with a rumble of disgust. The sponsors will be flinging money at their mentors, and Lyme is almost fascinated and a little impressed even as she cuts the feed. Lyme won her own Games entirely without sex, but that's rare, and a One who doesn't bare a little skin will get a boulder dropped on them from the sky before they're allowed to win. A Two may as well try to snag a Victory without making any kills.

The pair finish patching each other up and get dressed again, then gather their supplies and move out, moving across the rooftops and searching the streets below them. They're running out of Cornucopia supplies, and their mentors might have the money for more but they won't be allowed to use it, not until the tributes look a bit more desperate. The sponsors want to feel like their money is needed, that they made a difference and now have some sort of special connection.

Lyme switches back to Artemisia, who looks up at the sky with a thoughtful expression after the cannon fires. The live channel feed suddenly divides itself into quarters, one tribute in each section, and oh -- they're down to the Final Four. It's a good climactic act, as far as tributes go, between the laconic killer from Two, the boy with the baby and the bright blue eyes, and the first District One team-up past the split in years.

Artemisia gives the painted clouds one last glance before checking the placement of her weapons and heading back out.

 

* * *

 

The boy from Six still hasn't made a kill. He moves from place to place, telling stories about his girl and plans for his future baby to glean some food and water. It's nothing lavish or even all that exciting, but he receives each parachute with wide eyes and a humble 'thank you' that sets Lyme's teeth on edge. 

Lyme has no idea how a pair of teenagers who worked most of the days in the auto factories would have time for half the romantic moments that Six regales the audience with, but the sponsors must not care about details like that. Either way, Six is a gifted storyteller; Lyme watches the nightly recaps to get the overall picture of how the Games are being spun, and he weaves atmosphere and emotion with incredible skill for someone who never trained in painting the right narrative.

The commentators and editors are neutral, at least -- no clear favourites between the four have come out in the footage -- but the overall Capitol favourite is still by far the lone outlier. The sponsor ring is better, since the ones actually spending their money have grown frustrated with nothing to show for it but words, but outside the official Games coverage most of the attention is on Six. Talk show hosts mention the ease with which the Ones and Artemisia have handled it thus far; only Six has suffered, and only he shows any real pathos.

"Oh, bullshit," Dexter says once. He has his feet up on the desk, leaning back until his chair creaks, and he tosses his empty coffee mug into the air and catches it, apparently uncaring that if he misses it will land on his face and probably break his nose. "Yeah, wow, how easy our kids have it, working for every piece of food they get. How nice of them to thin the field for him so he can get close to the win without ever lifting a fucking finger."

"He's using what's at his disposal," Brutus says, shrugging, but he doesn't listen to Six's stories during the recaps either, always muting the sound to go over their rankings and incoming funds instead. "He can't fight worth shit but he can talk, so he's gonna talk." 

"That doesn't mean he deserves to win." Dexter spins his mug around his finger by the handle. "Don't get me wrong, I hate Edwin and I wish he'd trip on his own cattle prod and electrocute himself, but at least he earned his victory."

Brutus takes a sip of his coffee without looking away from his screen. "Ain't over yet," he says. 

 

* * *

 

The day passes without any of the tributes crossing each other's paths. Halfway through Day 16, the purification strip on Artemisia's bottle finally turns red as she fills it. "Well, shit," she says, tilting it back and forth and watching the liquid slosh up the sides; it will have worked on this batch, but anything else she adds will keep whatever toxins the Gamemakers put in it. "Better step it up." 

A good Career could make that bottle last for a few days, but the Ones still have the equipment to boil all the water they need, as well as the last of the food and supplies. Lyme has used every trick she has to get her girl enough to eat, but it's all standard week-three fare: dried meat and fruits, rations that don't require heating or soaking or any kind of preparation. Onscreen, Artemisia tips a small handful of nuts into her palm and crunches them one by one, though the salt will only be making her thirst worse.

"I could kill for some pears right now," Artemisia says, leaning her head back against the wall, then breaks out into a laugh for reasons only she can understand. She pushes a hand through her hair and grimaces when her fingers get stuck in the tangles, then pries apart the messy braid and starts working her fingertips through, combing out the knots from the bottom up. The bottom row of Lyme's console lights up as the algorithm helpfully suggests a hairbrush and a bottle of leave-in shampoo as sponsor gifts, for the low low price of a month's wages for an entire town in the quarries.

Lyme stares at the screen for a long second, then flips past to the second recommendation: a tin of pears, like the ones Artemisia squabbled over back on the first day. Brutus touches her elbow as she studies the specs and cost, and Lyme glances at him. "Make sure you get the ones without syrup," he says. Hollows ring his eyes and his jaw prickles with stubble but he's alert, and he pokes a finger at the console. "Look, see, those cheaper ones you're looking at, those get beginning mentors at least once if they're not careful. They're loaded up with sugar, and the kids crash hard and then dehydrate twice as fast. You want the ones in water."

"Shit." Lyme runs a hand over her face. They told her that, back in training, but her brain is starting to fuzz from the weeks of little sleep and a lot of worry. "Shit," she says again, leaning hitting her head against the back of the chair.

"Hey, nah, it's fine," Brutus says, and if she'd made this stupid a mistake back in the Village he'd mock her for ages but these are the Games and the rules are different. "They do it on purpose to trick you, so just be careful."

Her eyes prickle with exhaustion, and when Lyme rubs them her corneas protest. "Right," she says. "What do you think, worth it? We can't send water until she finishes what's in the bottle, it won't even show up as an option, but I -- I want to send her something."

Brutus reaches past her to flip through their funds, and the static numbers aren't looking too great -- they're eating through their reserves, since it's been four days since Artemisia made a kill -- but there's a big donation waiting if she makes one more night. If she doesn't -- well. Either way, there's more than enough to cover a small extravagance without cutting into the emergency pool.

"Do it," Brutus says. "I got an apple near the end, made my fucking week. Sometimes the morale boost is worth the price."

Lyme nods and punches in the order. Onscreen, Artemisia blinks up at the sky as the parachute descends, and when she opens it to see the fruit her expression breaks into an open, startled smile. "Thanks," she says, touching her fist to her chest, and she pries off the lid and sucks the standing water out of the can before pulling out a chunk of pear with her fingers.

"Feels good," Brutus says quietly, and Lyme nods.

Artemisia stretches it out as long as she can, but finally she swallows the last bite and tosses the can away. "Better sleep tonight," she says in an absent tone, like she's talking to herself and forgot the cameras are there. Still thinking about technique after two weeks is a good sign. "I'll go hunting tomorrow, see what I can catch."

 

* * *

 

The morning dawns with the sky a sea of blood when Lyme returns to the control centre after snatching a bit of sleep. Artemisia wakes up like a Career and not a girl, flicking the switch to alertness without the bleary middle, and she rolls over and looks up at the sky with a small smile on her face. "Red sky at morning, tributes take warning," she sing-songs, riffing on the popular rhyme. She gathers up her supplies, shoves everything into her pack, and heads out into the streets, taking a route in a tight square. She's building a perimeter, slowly widening her radius; wherever Six is he'll have to actively move to avoid running into her, and the Gamemakers won't let him get away with it for long.

Lyme sneaks a look at Phillips, who must be funding all the coffee plantations in Eleven on his own by now. He has to know it's pointless; his boy hasn't done anything but hide and tell stories, and while that's enough to have kept him supplied with a fairly steady stream of food and water, he has no kills to his name. That might make him a decent person, and the polls from the districts put him miles ahead of any of the Careers, but there's a rule about decency and Victors and those don't tend to coincide.

It's not personal, Lyme reminds herself. It's not her fault. Twenty-three die every year, including at least one Two, and there's no reason why this year's Victor shouldn't be hers.

 

* * *

 

An hour later Brutus contacts Lyme from the sponsor viewing lounge. "Hey, pull up Six's feed," he says in her headset, and Lyme switches the channel just in time for the boy to reach up and catch a giant, gleaming sword as it descends from the sky. "I've gotta go, I'm working, but just thought you should see." 

Lyme can't imagine what it must have cost Phillips to send a weapon like that this far into the Games, or how many bottles of water or baskets of fruit he could have gotten for the same amount of money. It makes a statement, though; Six is done hiding, and whether they're bluffing or they've had a secret plan in the works all along, it doesn't matter. The sponsors will be salivating, and like it or not Six has moved everyone onto the final act.

Six holds the weapon in both hands, turning it over and unhooking it from the parachute lines. His mouth holds a thin line, his eyebrows furrowed, but then he notices a slip of paper attached to the handle of the sword. He lifts it up, and the cameras switch angles to catch what's written on its surface.

It's a screen print of the pretty, dark-haired girl from home, smiling at the camera and pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes. Underneath it is a blurry black square with patches of white and grey, and it takes Lyme ages to clue in that it's a sonogram of the baby. "THEY'RE WAITING FOR YOU," reads the block print at the bottom, and Six stares at the note with wide eyes and a muscle jumping in the corner of his jaw.

"Holy shit." Dexter lets out a long whistle, impressed and envious and hateful all at once, judging by the twist of his mouth and the hard set of his eyes. "You're not messing around there, are you?"

At his station, Phillips drags a hand over his face. "We give them what they want," he says in a dull, matter-of-fact voice, run ragged by the sleepless nights and too much terrible coffee. 

Onscreen, Six lifts the weapon, eyes blazing bright with fever and dehydration and tears and something else, something deeper, and oh shit, this is it. This is his hero shot; this is the moment that, if he wins, they'll play at his exit interview and on all the recaps. The moment when everyone knew that this boy would take it home. Artemisia doesn't have one, and she never will -- not like this, the exhaustion and fear and resignation sloughing off and leaving nothing but steely determination.

Artemisia has skills, but Six has pathos, and the Gamemakers have meddled before when the audiences demanded a certain Victor win. Not that anyone could prove it, but Careers have found themselves stumbling when the ground caved in under one foot and kept them trapped just long enough for an outlier's axe or scythe or hammer to find its mark. Bad luck, the commentators call it, and the trainers never said otherwise but the way they always froze and refused even to glance at each other or pause the feed and ask the kids what they think happened pretty much clinched it.

Lyme hits the button to cut Six's feed, and her screen resolves back into Artemisia, one hand on the pommel of her sword as she stalks the streets, still maintaining the search pattern. The blip of her location puts her mere blocks away from the One pair, and if she kills them first -- if the final fight comes down to her and Six, with his fire still burning and the face of his girl seared into the brain of every member of the audience --

But no, no, her girl is smart, and more than that, so are the Ones. They're not going to kill each other off and risk leaving an outlier to sweep the crown once whoever survives the Career free for all is too weak to fend him off. It's an alliance that isn't, a second mutual non-aggression pact that will end when Six's portrait floats in the sky.

Artemisia unhooks her water bottle and takes a careful sip without stopping, and Lyme pushes off her headset and reaches for the phone. She has a call to make.

 

* * *

 

"Hector," Lyme says, not wasting time. "Is it ready?"

"Sent it off this morning with the first train out," says the man on the other line. "Should be getting there soon. Hope it helps." 

Nero told her that the weapon-smith who lives down at the fringes of ex-Career town in District 2's central ward, now pushing sixty, is the best in the district not just because of the quality of his blades but because Hector goes the extra mile. If anyone was going to make the sword Lyme's girl won her Games with, it would be him, and Lyme sent notes with Artemisia's measurements and analysis of her fighting style three weeks ago.

The audience will think she's copying Six, but it's not about them, not this time. Sending one last weapon before the final showdown is a Two tradition, at least in years where the Gamemakers allow it. Artemisia will have seen it happen every year from the age of thirteen onward; she'll know what it means.

"Thank you," Lyme says. She doesn't mention payment; Hector only takes money for his swords if the tribute wins, and it's bad luck to bring it up before the trumpets.

Hector invokes the mountains and earth in protection of Artemisia before hanging up, and Lyme sets down the handset and turns back to her console to check the polls.

 

* * *

 

Artemisia has been scouring the Arena for most of the afternoon, and while she's closing, Six has been moving just enough to keep himself out of her radius.The sponsors must be entertained by the constant near misses, otherwise the Gamemakers would have sent a whirlwind or a wall of fire or a pack of mutts to drive them together, but Lyme would be surprised if they let it drag on for much longer. Lyme is a hair away from using the last of her sponsor funds to send Artemisia a tracker just to get it over with. Only seventeen days, these Games, but now every hour crawls past. Did Lyme's own Arena really last longer than this?

"Wait," Lyme says, sitting up and staring at the screen. "Is she limping?" 

She is. It's subtle, nothing grandiose or life-threatening, but now when Artemisia puts her left foot to the ground her leg buckles, just slightly. Her expression stays stoic, of course, not admitting to the injury, but if anything it's overkill; her determination hyper-focuses every time she takes a step.

"Shit," Brutus says. "When was the last time she took a hit? Could be infection, just getting bad now."

"Could be." Artemisia's last fight was with Luca, and while Lyme would have to pull up the footage and replay it on half-speed to make sure, she doesn't think he got in any strikes on the leg. Without looking up or alerting anyone else to what she's doing, Lyme flicks through Artemisia's vitals; as far as she can tell, there's no blood poisoning; she's malnourished, dehydrated, and exhausted, yes, but nothing that reads like sepsis. Then again, Lyme herself had no more than a low-grade fever and surface burns, and by the end she had one leg dragging, too. Maybe Artemisia pulled a muscle during the walk; maybe there's a stone in her shoe. Maybe it's just seventeen days in a death trap with too little food, water, and rest, that would certainly do it. Had done it to Luca with less time to feel the strain.

The longer Artemisia walks, the more obvious it gets that she's favouring her leg. She still tries to hide it, pretending to check the soles of her boots for pebbles or examining the trail ahead of her, but each time she stands her face spasms in another controlled wince. Once she turns a corner and rolls her ankle on a loose chunk of concrete, and this time Artemisia stops, hisses a sharp breath then lets out a quiet "Fuck!" She takes a minute to centre herself, then drags a hand down her face and keeps going.

She runs into Six almost immediately, of course, and Lyme's fingers tighten on the arms of her chair. Across the room Phillips sits up straight.

"May the odds," Dexter calls out, only a little sardonically, and salutes them both with his mug.

They face each other in the square, and Artemisia reaches back to close her hand around the pommel of her sword. "So are you going to fight me?" she asks, face tight with pain even as she affects her usual nonchalant drawl, and she keeps her weight on her off foot. "Or are you going to tell me stories and hope I just lie down and die for you?"

Six's mouth thins. "I'll do what I have to do," he says, clipping his words. "I got somebody to go home to. You just like to kill people."

That, if the years of meticulous Centre records on Artemisia are any indication, is an entirely true statement, but Artemisia narrows her eyes. "You don't know shit about me," she says, bringing her sword around and swinging it in a slashing arc. It's neither a confirmation nor a denial, and hopefully the mystery works better than a fabricated last-minute story about a girl of her own back home. "Quit stalling and let's do this."

"Sorry if I don't know the etiquette for duels to the death," Six snaps, the first sign of any personality he's shown since coming into the Arena, as far as Lyme's concerned. Apparently even the boy with the indefatigable spirit has his limits.

Artemisia has been trained on swords since the age of ten; Six swung a few around in training before heading for the survival stations. The fight should be over in a minute, three if Artemisia is feeling generous.

It's not. 

On her first lunge her leg gives out from under her, and Six blinks in surprise when Artemisia bites off a yelp and goes down on one knee, her strike going wide, but he rallies after a moment and attacks. Artemisia blocks him but she's on the defensive, fighting to rise to her feet without collapsing again. Lyme grips the chair harder, fighting the urge to dig her nails into her skin and tear, and beside her Brutus' breathing comes out in controlled bursts as he does the same.

The weeks of waiting explode outward as Six fights, and this is exactly what Lyme hoped wouldn't happen; a cornered outlier with something to fight for, technical skills aside, can best a Career if the circumstances align themselves. If Artemisia is injured -- if the dehydration has hit her harder than pure vitals have let on -- if the purification strip actually stopped being effective before the indicator turned red and the toxins have been leaching into her blood -- any number of things could dull Artemisia's edge enough to let one good strike in. And as Brutus' boy Malachi found out last year when an outlier bashed in his brains with a sledgehammer, it only takes one.

The longer the fight goes, the more Six feels his chances improving. The raw desperation bleeds out of him, and conviction enters his stance. His eyes blaze with hope and determination, and again he drives her back, back, back. Artemisia stumbles, loses her footing at a crack in the sidewalk and goes down hard, rolling to avoid impaling herself on her own weapon.

Six stands over her, breathing hard; Artemisia stares up at him, eyes wide and ringed with white, and this is worse than Lyme's Arena, worse than a thousand Arenas, worse than every step Lyme took with the burnt skin on her calves stretching and peeling, worse than every dead tribute's face who haunted her dreams at night. At least she could act; watching it, sitting in the plush chair with a cooling cup of coffee at her elbow is the worst thing Lyme has ever faced. Artemisia is going to die and there is nothing, nothing Lyme can do about it.

Finally Six strikes, and Lyme wants to look away but she can't look away and tonight it will be on the recap in split-screen slow-motion, showing the blow from his point of view and hers, and Lyme can't breathe and Brutus is silent at her side -- 

At the last second Artemisia springs to her feet, brings her sword around and slashes Six through the belly, dragging her blade in deep and swinging it in a sharp arc once it's free of his body. Blood smears the ground, her clothes, and the nearest camera lens; Six crumples to his knees, his stomach a mess of pink and red, hands scrabbling at his abdomen as the sword clatters to the ground and his expression goes slack. Artemisia steps back, avoiding most of the gore, and she pulls a knife from her sleeve and flips it in her hand, watching him struggle and gasp on the ground. She studies him, tilting her head as though to gauge whether she needs to strike again to end it.

_Fast, but messy_ , Lyme told her that night on the balcony. She'd forgotten, in the haze of everything else, but apparently her tribute didn't.

Six lets out one last rattle and falls still; the cannon fires a second later, and Artemisia slips her knife back into her sleeve. She bends down, picks up Six's pack and slings it over her shoulder, then leaves his body on the ground without a backward glance.

It takes Lyme until Artemisia clears the square and turns the corner to realize she's not limping.

"Holy shit," Brutus mutters under his breath. "Holy  _shit_ ."

Phillips lets out a choked cry, jamming a fist in his mouth to muffle the sound, but instead it only rises and turns into a full wailing scream. It makes the hairs on Lyme's arms stand up, and this is the sound every outlying mentor would have made when she killed their tributes, what she would have done if Artemisia was the one being airlifted into a hovercraft right now, and why won't he  _stop_ ?

"Get him out of here," Dexter snaps. No more camaraderie, no more playful commentary; it's his boy and Sapphire's girl left against Artemisia, and he'll have no time for mourning mentors upsetting the room with their grief.

Phillips stiffens, and he drags himself out of his chair and stumbles out of the room. It's the longest Six has ever made since his own Victory, and who knows when they'll have another chance. And now there's a girl with a baby and no house in the Village or a Victor's stipend to help her take care of it, weeks of hope undone by a single slash of a sword.

Lyme turns back to her screen, where Artemisia pulls a package of trail mix from Six's bag and tears it open, pouring it directly into her mouth. The hollows under her eyes stand out dark above her cheeks, and when she finishes the last of Six's water Artemisia takes a second to rest, leaning with her back against a crumbling wall and closing her eyes.

Six, his girl, the baby, Phillips -- it all disappears. None of that matters now. It's Artemisia now and forever, and Lyme swallows a burst of hysterical laughter because they're almost home, Artemisia has almost done it, and now it's Lyme's turn to make a move. She pries her fingers loose from her chair and calls up her list of pre-approved gifts.

Artemisia still has her eyes shut when the piping sound of a parachute catches her attention. She opens them one at a time, pushing herself off the wall with her hands, and like Six she catches the sword in mid-air. The control room is silent around Lyme as Artemisia pries the weapon free of the silvery fabric and swings it in a test arc; the metal sings in the air, and the girl takes a step back, eyes wide. "Oh," she says, soft and startled, and her eyes find the cameras in an unthinking glance before she catches herself. Still, even as she pulls herself back, Artemisia runs her fingers along the length of the blade before slashing it again, eyes gleaming.

Like Lyme two years ago, this will be the first time Artemisia has ever touched a weapon hand-crafted for her, after a decade of generic Centre-blades made for any trainee with her height and reach. Lyme still recalls the jolt of surprise when the sword Nero sent her moved almost without her asking, and every memory of her life before that moment sat pale and washed-out in her mind, like looking through a grimy window.

_Your mentor is watching_ , the sword says.  _You're not alone. Come home._

Artemisia lets out a long breath and finishes her manoeuvres, and like with the can of pears her face breaks out into a smile, for once without a hint of sarcasm or her usual laconic devil-may-care attitude. "All right then," she says finally, reverently, stroking her fingertips over the blade again. "A nice girl like you deserves to go somewhere special. You wanna go on a double-date with some Ones, baby? I bet you do." 

Brutus slaps a hand to his forehead, but Lyme doesn't care. Let Artemisia coo at weapons all she wants, as long as she comes home. Artemisia straps the new sword to her waist, leaving her old one on her back, and heads out in search of the finale as the sun leaves bloody streaks across the swiftly darkening skies.

 

* * *

 

Lyme flips to the public feed, leaving Artemisia's screen playing in the bottom corner. The Ones look up at the sky when the cannon sounds, then exchange a knowing glance and leave their supplies behind, taking only their weapons. Only the hunters are left, and there's no point in drawing it out any longer. Meanwhile the experts providing the voiceover are busy analyzing the remaining tributes' chances; Six is dead, and while the audience might be mourning his loss -- no doubt there will be riots in Six tonight until the Peacekeepers bring them down -- as far as the commentators are concerned, that's useless airtime.

"Six or Two," says Camphor, polishing her dagger as they walk. "Who do you think is left?" 

"Two," Skye says immediately. "She wants it more."

Camphor gives him a look. "Bullshit, he's got a baby on the way."

"So?" He shrugs. "That just means he wants to go  _home_ . Everybody wants to go home, they're just not willing to do what it takes to get there. We are. Fuck that outlier crybaby bullshit, they just want everyone else to do their dirty work."

Camphor makes a thoughtful 'hmm' sound and switches her knifes, dragging the whetstone along the length of the blade. "I guess. I hope it's Two. She was an annoying bitch, never taking anything seriously."

"She'll take you seriously when you skin her," Skye promises, and his district partner flashes him a bright smile.

"Then it's just you and me," Camphor says. She tucks the whetstone into a pocket on her belt and slides her dagger back into its sheath. "I'll make it quick, just because you've been so nice." 

He laughs, his smile sharp and predatory. "You'll never get the chance."

_No,_ Lyme thinks.  _You won't_ .

 

* * *

 

No theatrics from the Gamemakers when the remaining tributes meet, which is an interesting thematic choice. Usually there's something -- thunder in the distance, crashes of lightning, wind or darkness or a firestorm -- but here it's just the three of them and the sunset frozen overhead. Then the crimson fingers spread outward but the sun stays in its place across the horizon, and ah, there it is. Gamemakers are paid too much to resist a little scene-setting, and the light glints red and gold on the blades as the former pack-mates stand off against each other.

"You're going down, bitch," Camphor calls out. She has one nastily curved dagger in each hand; one wrong swipe and Artemisia's guts will spill out over the street with half the effort it took her to do the same to Six.

Artemisia grins. "If you wanted that you should've asked nicely a week ago," she leers. Brutus will be rolling his eyes, but the cameras love the banter, and usually by the finale both parties are too exhausted to bother. This time it's three warriors against each other; they can't just start clashing weapons without a show, and they know it.

"Do you want us to flip a coin?" Skye asks, lifting his sabre in a challenge. "Or should I just let ladies go first?" 

"No," Artemisia says, and the Arena glitters in her eyes. "Let's do this, two against one."

The commentators will love the opportunity for a pun, no doubt, but the tributes don't bother. "Fine by me," Camphor says, and she and her district partner fan out, weapons at the ready. 

In answer, Artemisia pulls both swords free, Hector's in her left and her spare in the other. The trainers would have warned her against a dual-bladed approach with anything longer than her forearm, but apparently life or death is not the time for her to start listening to conventional advice. The three of them circle each other, taking careful sidesteps to avoid tangling their feet as the spirals draw tighter and tighter, and finally the tension breaks.

Lyme has studied Artemisia's file so much she has it memorized; she scoured the footage of her in training before the Arena for any last tricks. If the Gamemakers had given her access to the private session she would have examined that too, but even without that, going in she was confident that if anyone in Panem knew Artemisia's potential, it was her mentor. 

Not even close.

It's a battle and a dance and -- poetry, almost -- as Artemisia takes on both armed Ones at once. After a minute she starts laughing, but it's not the crazed, gleeful cackles of a tribute who snaps at the end; it's not even the dark chuckles of bloodlust or the need to kill. It's wild and joyous and free; it's the thrill of an honest fight without pretence or artifice, of finally,  _finally_ being able to let go, and it loosens something in Lyme's chest to hear her. 

Over the past three weeks Lyme has seen Artemisia run through a gamut of emotions, from murderous to lazy to mocking. She's never seen her  _happy_ , not until now. Not until she's locking blades with two strong, well-fed, determined opponents in a fight where if she holds back they'll run her through.

This probably makes Artemisia crazy, but ask Lyme if she cares. Her only thought is she's never seen anything so pure.

Camphor goes down first, eyes wide and staring when she hits the ground, dead in a second from a hard blow to the side of the head. Then it's Artemisia versus Skye, and he's bigger and taller but Artemisia tosses away the extra sword, and with her and the weapon Lyme designed for her, she's a force of nature. Skye's expression barely has time to shift from resolve to panic before Artemisia is on him, and once again Lyme's advice rings in her own ears:  _Clean kills are for opponents you respect._

He falls. The final cannon fires. Artemisia yanks her sword free from Skye's chest and staggers back, wiping a hand across her face and only managing to smear the blood and grime across her cheekbones, up over her forehead into her hair. She blinks up at the sky, and she's breathing hard but her vitals are clear and she's standing straight, strong and proud. "How many was that?" Artemisia calls out, flicking the blade in a sharp, clean gesture to send the excess spatters of red flying. "I've lost count."

Brutus sucks in a sharp inhale through his teeth. "Girl, don't fucking play  _now_ ," he mutters under his breath, and Lyme can't breathe, can't focus, can't decide whether to choke on frantic laughter or cringe in fear. 

The trumpets blare in the traditional fanfare, and Artemisia tips her head back, shading her eyes with one hand and looking not quite at the nearest camera as she brings the sword up and rests it against her shoulder.

"Congratulations!" booms the voice from the skies, as the clouds pull back to reveal an artificial blue sky and a Gamemaker-created sun that tints the world with gold. "We present the Victor of the 57 th Hunger Games!"

Artemisia grins, wild and wicked and holy shit, holy shit she's won, she's  _won_ , and somewhere in the central mentor lounge the outlying Victors will be throwing things at the viewing screen and muttering about  _another fucking Two_ but Lyme doesn't care, her girl has done it and she's coming  _home_ .

"Well, well," Artemisia drawls, cocking her hip and watching the hovercraft descend. "How about that."

"Good luck with that one," Brutus says wryly, clapping Lyme on the shoulder, but he's grinning at her, eyes crinkled. Lyme doesn't even bother to flip him off before vaulting over her chair and racing for the door.

 

* * *

 

Lyme only gets a little way before an aide steps in front of her and holds up a hand. He's slight and willowy and Lyme could break him in half with her bare hands but he stares at her with the implacable smile of a tiny kitten standing in front of a snarling mountain lion. "The president would like to see you before you speak to your Victor."

That is not a sentence anyone wants to hear, and Lyme clasps her left hand over her Victor tattoo. At least this aide still has his tongue; whenever an Avox glides up and hands her a note Lyme gets the urge to peel invisible spiderwebs from her skin. "Of course," she says, the formal phrasing still sitting oddly in her mouth after half a lifetime of  _fuck you muttfucking fucktards_ . 

The aide nods. "Follow me." 

It doesn't take much brains to know what she's being called in for; Artemisia's lackadaisical arrogance looked good at the Reaping, but Victors are meant to be humbled by the Arena, brought down so that by the time the trumpets play they're grateful for the honour. They don't grin and wink and crack a pose, and they sure as hell don't pretend they've forgotten how many other tributes were left toward the end.

Lyme had been arrogant, too, though she'd burned hot and angry instead of strolling along in nonchalance, but even she had been exhausted by the end. Her sword arm ached, she'd tied up a gash on her leg with a hard-won sponsor bandage, and she'd stared up a the cameras while the sun beat down on her face and the blood dried sticky against her skin and just wanted to go  _home_ .

The president had given Lyme a cool smile, congratulated her on her ingenuity, and said he hoped to see her put it to good use very soon. Now, walking through the smooth wood-panelled corridors, Lyme doubts that's the message Snow is going to ask her to pass on to Artemisia when she wakes up.

(Absurdly she misses Nero, his strong, silent presence behind her calming her jitters and suffusing her with confidence. She's not going to tell him that.)

The audience room is exactly how Lyme remembers, which is likely intentional. It throws her back to being fresh out, drugged and dazed and chasing shadows, but that part of her life is over and Lyme sidesteps it. President Snow hasn't changed in two years, either, brown hair artistically flecked with grey around the temples, and he favours Lyme with a smile that makes her want to reach for a knife.

Instead she nods, fist over her chest in a salute of respect. "Mr. President." 

"Ms. Lyme," he says, inclining his head, and Lyme thought Nero was going to take her head off that first interview when she'd corrected the president's use of 'Miss', but he's never gone back on it since. "You have an interesting Victor on your hands."

'Interesting' is never something anyone wants to hear the president say either. Lyme takes a measured breath. "She promised a good show," Lyme says carefully. (Step left, avoid the clot of dirt that marks a buried mine.) "I hope she's done that."

"Oh, she has, make no mistake," the president says, and that's Brutus' favourite tone, the amused, exasperated voice of someone who disapproves but is choosing to be indulgent. "One wonders, though, if she's truly grateful for the opportunity that has been awarded her. I get the impression that she thinks she's snatched this victory for herself out of the sky." 

"It's just her persona," Lyme says (run through the next stretch, don't slow down or she'll miss a step and blow her foot off). "We were setting her opposite the boy from Six, making sure everyone knew she was the one to watch." 

"Hmm." 

No one syllable should instil such terror, but the president has a talent for doing just that. It's fine; Two is in favour, Twos are protected, Twos are loyal and the Capitol protects those who show fealty and there's a bridge for sale if anyone is interested in buying it.

"She is grateful," Lyme's fingers twitch, seeking the edge of her sleeves to tug them down, but she holds them steady (twist mid-stride, land on her toes and look for the next safe spot). "In the Arena she was just worried about surviving and she couldn't break her image. Now that she's been allowed to win, I'm sure she'll be properly thankful for the honour and the privilege."

"I'm glad to hear it." The president tilts his head, eyes narrowing. "Favour is a wonderful thing, Ms. Lyme, but it is also ephemeral. Morning mist over the mountains is a beautiful sight, most inspiring, but if the sun shines too hot it burns away and nothing remains but rocks and dust."

Lyme doesn't bother trying to pin down the metaphor, only nods like he just said something profound. "I understand, sir."

"Good." He snaps the 'd', and Lyme suddenly stiffens at the change in the air. "Because I know for a fact that Phillips from Six would have dropped to his knees when he entered this room if his boy had been allowed to live. He would not have made speeches promising deference; he would have  _shown_ me."

Lyme hits the ground before he finishes his sentence, pain shooting through her kneecaps straight up through her thighs. "I'm sorry, sir." She stares down at the floor, leaning forward and splaying both hands against the plush carpet in front of her. Her shoulders tremble and every prepared word, every pretty phrase, flies from her head. There are mines around her and fire behind and nowhere to move. "I'm not taking this for granted, I promise I'm not, and neither will she. Let her have the interview with Caesar and she'll show you." 

The clock on the far wall ticks off the seconds, and finally the president laughs. The sound hits the base of her spine and curls there, digging nails into her skin. "Good," he says. "I'm glad we understand each other. I'll be very interested to see how well you can control your Victor. You know what they say about dogs who bite the hand that feeds them."

"Yes sir," Lyme says again, her mind still blank except for one word on repeat:  _obey obey obey_ . "Yes sir, I promise." 

"Get up, you look ridiculous," the president says idly, and Lyme staggers to her feet, nearly stumbling when her foot catches on a rise in the carpet. "I enjoyed our talk, Ms. Lyme. You're dismissed."

Lyme walks until the giant door closes behind her, but once the heavy  _thud_ reverberates through the long corridor, she bursts into a run. To get away from that room, to get to the hospital wing faster -- which, Lyme isn't sure, but she skids around the corners and nearly slams into a wall but finally she's there. The doctors fuss and shoo her out and make her wait outside the room, where Lyme paces in front of the glass window for what feels like hours until the hovercraft arrives. 

Artemisia is awake, and she catches sight of Lyme through the plate glass and tosses off a jaunty wave. "You cheeky little shit," Lyme says to herself, and her girl -- her  _Victor_ \-- either reads her face or her lips or both because her grin widens and she makes a heart out of her steepled fingers. Lyme laughs, the sound rusty in her chest, and she stays until they put Artemisia under and threaten to do the same to Lyme if she won't retire to the waiting lounge.

Lyme vows to stay awake until Artemisia is out of Remake, but she stretches out on the sofa (just for a second! to make the nurses stop complaining!) and the world stutters out. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh dear, Misha. Enjoy it while it lasts.


	4. Deep Breaths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The nice thing is, the Arena guilt seems to have skipped Artemisia completely. The bad thing is there's a countdown on that; they might run but it's always chasing, and no one, not even the most complacent or vicious Victors, make it through their Victory Tour without it catching up._
> 
> Lyme wants to give Artemisia something good before the Victory Tour drags the rug out from under her. Luckily she has a whole Village to help her out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little lighter, this time -- the calm before the Tour, as it were.

Lyme wakes up in the middle of the night, and as she blinks awake in the darkness she runs a quick check to see what brought her out of sleep. Heart rate and breathing even, no pounding or aching in her chest, which means no nightmares even if she didn't remember them. No crashes of thunder rattle the window panes, no gusts of wind moan through the cracks, and no branches scrape at the sides of the house. Not weather then, either.

The rest of the house is silent, and Lyme narrows her eyes. There's no reason it shouldn't be silent -- Artemisia took her pills after dinner and went to bed like a good little Victor -- except that Artemisia has never been a good little Victor yet she complied with tonight's medication routine without complaining. Lyme swears under her breath and throws off the blanket, swinging her legs over the edge of the sofa. The wooden floor is cold against her bare soles, and she heads for the stairs, balancing on the balls of her feet and stepping close to the walls to avoid creaking.

It's probably nothing, except Lyme is quickly learning that those are the times when something definitely is happening. You can't turn your back on a fresh Victor for a minute, so they say, but the bumps in her own recovery and her girl's restless spirit make Lyme wary of constant supervision. Sometimes privacy has to come before trust, she figured, but that's a great theory until something breaks. She makes it up to Artemisia's room without making noise -- stealth isn't something you just forget, especially when dealing with a Victor who apparently spent her pre-Residential days breaking and entering -- and pushes open the door a crack.

Artemisia's bed is mussed, the blankets askew and one pillow on the floor ... and entirely missing its supposed occupant. Lyme drags a hand down her face. "Shit," she mutters.

Lyme fights down the initial spike of panic with a wash of logic. No way could Artemisia slip past her out the front door; it might have been two years since the Arena but Lyme would wake at the sound of someone else's breathing no matter how quiet they tried to be. There's a chance she's hiding under the bed or in the closet like a child hoping to scare her mother, but Lyme doesn't think so; hiding and waiting requires, well, _waiting_ , and patience and Artemisia go together like Brutus and ballet. 

She immediately zeroes in on the window, and the sash is down and the curtains still but Lyme will still bet her stipend that that's where her errant Victor went. Lyme crosses the room and pushes up the window, taking in the distance to the ground below. Ten feet, maybe a bit more; enough to jump and not break anything if you do it right, but probably not enough to risk it. Not when the gate guards would stop Artemisia from leaving, and her girl might be crazy but nothing has indicated she's willing to climb over barbed wire just to stick it to her mentor.

Artemisia might have headed for the trails, but again, she's not stupid, and a mountain path in the dark is a surefire way to get your leg broken. Since Artemisia seems to think sitting still is one step away from insanity, Lyme can only assume she'd avoid anything with a high chance of landing her in weeks of bed rest.

None of the Victor houses have drainpipes near the windows (the architects aren't stupid either) and that leaves only one possibility. Lyme sticks her torso through the window and twists around to look up, but there's nothing to see but the bottom edge of the roof and the bright speckling of stars in the sky above, framed by dark fingertips of tree branches.

Nothing for it, then. Lyme reaches out, curls her fingers around the edge of the roof and heaves herself up, arm muscles straining once her feet leave the purchase of the windowsill. Still, she's climbed far worse in training wearing weighted anklets and carrying a full pack, and a few seconds later Lyme hauls herself up and over the edge.

Artemisia sprawls on the roof, arms folded behind her head, one foot dangling lazily over the other bent knee. "Well done," she says, teeth glinting in the moonlight. "I thought for sure you'd run out the front door first."

"You'll have to get up earlier in the morning for that to work," Lyme drawls, and she should be angry, probably, should scold or tell Artemisia to get back inside right now, but the sight of her girl, safe and alive and grinning wickedly, fills her with nothing but relief. Lyme stretches out on the shingles a foot or two away and stares up at the sky. "Couldn't sleep?"

"Nah."

"That happens when you pocket your meds instead of swallowing," Lyme says. No way could anyone get onto the roof with the dosage her girl should've taken. "Where'd you put them?"

Artemisia snickers, but this time there's a nasty edge to it, dark and challenging. "Like I'm telling you." 

Lyme glances over, eyes narrowed, and she thinks back to when she was fresh out and the desire to push, to rebel and strike out and disobey burned beneath her skin. She'd tried to stuff her pills between the sofa cushions, wanted to get them out of the way and never think about them again, but Artemisia doesn't hide from things, she twists them into weapons. She'd keep them close.

"They're in your sock," Lyme hazards, and she's rewarded when her Victor's eyes widen for just a second before her nonchalant expression returns. "Hand 'em over."

Artemisia stiffens, and for a second Lyme thinks they're going to have to scrap right here on the roof, but then she snorts and digs two fingers under the edge of the fabric around her ankle. "Cheater," she says, but her tone is more amused than mulish, and she slaps the pills into Lyme's outstretched palm. "You saw me do it."

Lyme doesn't answer; either Artemisia thinks Lyme has eyes in the back of her head or that she's preternatural, and both of those work for a mentor's purposes. "You're too off-schedule to take them now," she says, and slips them into her pocket. "We'll start again tomorrow." 

"I don't like them," Artemisia says, her voice like gravel. "They make my head all fuzzy. I hate that."

"Nobody likes them," Lyme says. "You still have to take them."

"I couldn't fight if someone attacked me when I'm on the meds." Artemisia's posture stays loose and languid, but her voice tightens and her breath comes hard and shallow. "I just -- how am I supposed to sleep when anybody could come in and kill me?"

Lyme panicked the first time the medication took hold, dragging her down against her will and carpeting her brain in soft wool. She'd reached for a knife and been unable to close her fingers around the handle even if Nero hadn't replaced it with a hairbrush when she wasn't looking. But just like Nero did then, Lyme knows what to say.

"Nobody would kill you, because I'd rip them in half first," she says. "They wouldn't get a foot inside the house."

"My hero," Artemisia sing-songs, but her shoulders lower and she shifts position, rolling over onto her side to stare at Lyme. "So what do I get for busting out?"

Lyme raises an eyebrow. "You don't get points for housebreaking, not even from the inside out. Maybe a cookie for creativity."

Artemisia bares her teeth. "That's not what I meant and you know it. I don't mean what are you gonna give me, I mean what am I gonna  _get_ ."

Her voice twists and turns ugly, and Lyme's breath sticks like knives in her chest because that's familiar, too. Artemisia's imitating someone, and nobody in the Centre ever talked like that. Nobody in Lyme's life ever did except for one person. Artemisia's files never mentioned it explicitly but bruises don't lie, and while sometimes Lyme wondered, now she doesn't have to.

Rage floods her again, and Lyme takes a breath in through her nose and lets it out between her teeth, trying to unclench her jaw. "Nothing," she says. "I'm not going to hit you so you'll listen."

"You should," Artemisia says, flat out, and something sparks behind her eyes. "It's the only way to make me. My old man knew me for way longer than you, and even he couldn't figure it out."

"Your old man sounds like a fucking idiot," Lyme says before she can stop herself, but while she can't keep the words from tumbling out she at least manages to lance the venom before it's too late. "And I'm sure he tried really hard, too."

Artemisia laughs. "Don't kid yourself, mentor, I'm a nightmare. You'll see."

Lyme exhales again, fingers digging into her palms. "I guess we will."

They don't talk for a while, but finally Artemisia fidgets. "So now what?"

Lyme quirks her mouth. "So now I go down and get us some blankets in case it gets chilly and we stay here until morning, or we go back inside and try our luck. You have any preference?"

Artemisia frowns, first in confusion, then deeper, like she knows there's a trick somewhere and she can't decide who she's more angry at, Lyme for playing it or herself for not being able to root it out. "You'd really stay out on the roof all night just because I don't feel like going inside."

Lyme shrugs. "It's not going to rain, so why not? Weather's nice."

"I could push you off." Artemisia says it casually, her tone like the first experimental swing of a new blade, testing weight and balance before turning to strike.

Lyme doesn't blink. "Girl, you could try," she says, and this morning she pinned Artemisia to the floor until both shoulders hit the ground and held her there until her Victor stopped spitting.

The pause stretches out longer and tighter, but finally Artemisia laughs. "Okay, okay, I won't try to murder you tonight. I do want to stay outside, though. Inside is -- I dunno. The walls kept getting smaller."

"They do that," Lyme says. "It's nice to look up and see real stars, not the Gamemakers' grid."

"Yeah." Artemisia huffs a laugh, half wonderment half confusion. "I keep forgetting you went through all this."

"Everybody here did," Lyme reminds her. "You're not alone."

"No, I'm not," Artemisia says dryly, and Lyme remembers that frustration, too, feeling like winning the Games meant she'd signed away all privacy without ever realizing she was holding the pen. But when Lyme ducks back inside and climbs up with a couple of blankets draped over her shoulder, her Victor is still there. Artemisia takes the blanket Lyme hands her and rolls it up under her head. "If I have a nightmare and happen to kick you off the roof, though, that's not my fault."

"If you have a nightmare and manage to kick me off the roof, I deserve it for getting slow," Lyme counters, and this time when Artemisia laughs she actually sounds like she means it. "You sleep, I'll be here."

Artemisia closes her eyes and evens out her breathing. She fakes sleep for a good twenty minutes while Lyme rolls her eyes in the darkness, but finally the cadence of her breaths changes and she's down for real, forehead puckered in a frown. Lyme hesitates -- touch wakes her, sometimes -- but finally she reaches over and combs her fingers through Artemisia's hair, barely grazing her scalp. Slowly, slowly, the furrows smooth away, and Artemisia exhales in a quiet sigh.

Lyme stays mostly awake, alternating between watching her and slipping into a light doze, until the sky turns pink behind the jagged black mountains and the morning birds take up the call. She places her own blanket over her sleeping Victor when the air turns chill in the cold light of pre-dawn; Artemisia stirs when the first sunbeam hits her face, and she yawns and flails absently at the light, smacking herself in the forehead.

"Breakfast?" Lyme asks, having long snatched her hand back and moved a respectable distance away.

"Mmr," Artemisia says, squinting one-eyed. "Are you cooking, 'cause right now I think I'd burn the house down."

Lyme winks at her. "Yeah, I'll cook, then we can go outside and spar so your muscles don't hate you for sleeping out here."

Artemisia rubs a hand over her face and sits up, Lyme's blanket draped around her shoulders and her hair sticking up at the back. "Sure," she says casually, and Lyme has to look away before her face betrays her. "I want eggs."

"Eggs it is," Lyme says, and Artemisia's mouth twitches in a smile.

 

* * *

 

The nice thing is, the Arena guilt seems to have skipped Artemisia completely. The bad thing is there's a countdown on that; they might run but it's always chasing, and no one, not even the most complacent or vicious Victors, make it through their Victory Tour without it catching up.

Brutus says his Tour passed in a haze of drugs and night terrors and a sick twisting in his stomach that never went away. He saw the faces of the dead behind his eyes, felt their bones cracking under his fingers. "I know I did right by doing it, and I gave them good deaths," Brutus says, and he and Lyme don't really do this, don't talk about  _feelings_ , but this is blood and metal and nightmares, which is different. "But I'm telling you, it didn't matter for shit when every time I went to drink water I thought of the girl whose neck I snapped to get some." 

"It wasn't guilt, exactly," Callista tells Lyme one rainy afternoon when Nero has custody of Artemisia. Lyme sits on the couch and tries not to telegraph how much she hates cats, because Callista's mangy alley rescues can  _tell_ . As soon as she glares at one, three of them are in her lap, purring and trying to rub their asses in her face. "I just -- well, I was a silly little thing, you know, buoyed up on the glory. I thought everyone loved me. The Victory Tour was the first time I realized they didn't." She raises her wine glass in a wry salute. "Far from it, in fact. Naiveté at its finest, I know."

With Artemisia, it's not that Lyme thinks she's naive; her girl doesn't think everyone loved her, no one who murdered a boy with a baby back home is going to fall for that, especially not one with as thin a veneer of duty as Artemisia. She's like Lyme, going into the Arena for herself and her own demons rather than any kind of overarching purpose, and her thing is that everyone might hate her but she's convinced herself she doesn't care. Whether that survives the Tour is another matter, but Lyme would put a hell of a lot of money on no.

Lyme isn't going to force that out of Artemisia ahead of time. Lyme came out of the Arena trying to scrub it from her skin -- literally, scouring her Victor tattoo with soap and salt and fingernails -- and her Tour memories are a mess of screaming and dull-eyed stares and curling in Nero's lap with his thick fingers combing the glitter from her hair. She'd Volunteered because all her life people called her a monster, and it amused her to prove them right; the Tour had shown her just how true that had been. She'd applied for mentor training as soon as the Centre would allow it so she could start building a wall of pebbles to hold back the raging sea of sin and guilt.

So no, Lyme is in no hurry. Artemisia's crazy comes from the Arena itself and all the expectations riding on her for the win, but also from three weeks of doing absolutely whatever she damn well pleased before coming back to the Village with its rules and its walls and its benign, suffocating togetherness. She tasted blood and they took it away, and Lyme remembers that, too; she'd killed ten people in the Arena, and now she wasn't allowed to use a can opener.

The only way she can think to vent the pressure so that Artemisia doesn't completely lose it is to give her somewhere to get rid of it. She's not going to send her off into an alley with a knife like Callista used to do as a young Victor, but she needs to leave the Village and know that her mentor won't be breathing down her neck the whole time. Lyme talks to Brutus first to get the okay (his expression, like he's trying not to spit out something unpleasant because his mother made it, or maybe like if he laughs everyone he loves will get shot in the head, makes Lyme skewer him with a glare), then to Emory to double-check.

"Why me?" Emory asks, frowning. "You're her mentor."

"Well, exactly," Lyme points out. It's -- tricky, with Emory, who hasn't mentored yet because Brutus is afraid she'll break with her first loss, but so far the older girl hasn't shown resentment toward Lyme for having her own Victor before she's even tried once. They grow the Odin branch in some special soil, apparently. "Who wants to go to the bar with their mentor?"

"I did." Emory gives her a blank-faced stare, and Lyme very diplomatically does not say 'exactly'. 

"I think it's important to give her time with other people," Lyme says instead. She had no one but Nero for months, and between her pre-Arena issues and all the mess that got jumbled up inside her head after, she'd gone into autumn pretty much hating his face, his voice, and everything about him before he fixed it. There were days when even his breathing seemed too loud. "I don't want to crowd her or make her think she can't have fun without me there."

Emory just looks at Lyme like she started reciting a recipe for sandwiches that involves the eyeballs of babies, but finally she nods. "All right," she says with a sigh. "Ground rules?"

And -- oh. Lyme hadn't thought of that, and she covers the fumble as well as she can by pretending to think about it. Emory would be a good mentor, head full of rules and procedures and precedent before she's even looked at a tribute file, and sometimes Lyme wonders if the universe made a mistake and is doing things the wrong way round. 

(Too late to take it back, though; Artemisia is hers and hers forever, and all that means is Lyme has to strike the balance between letting her girl know she's staying, and driving her away by holding on too hard.)

"Don't let her go home with anyone," Lyme says, and Emory licks her lips and tries, not very successfully, to hide a grimace. "It's not like that, I'm not telling you to take her out to a sex club and then tell her she can't have fun, just -- wherever she goes, she's going to want to. I've read her file. She was -- enthusiastic. Don't stop her, just don't let her leave, either." 

She leaves out the part where Artemisia has been doing everything she possibly can to get Callista to notice her, since that seems to fall on the 'too much information' side of things. Lyme is trying to convince their most straight-laced Victor to take their newest wild child out, not make her run screaming in the other direction.

Emory pinches the bridge of her nose in a gesture that's so classically Brutus that Lyme has to swallow a laugh. "You sure know how to sell a fun night out, let me tell you," she says dryly. "All right then. Take her out, let her get some of this out of her system, but make sure she stays put. Anything else?"

"I don't know if she'll try to get drunk," Lyme says slowly. Artemisia's file is full of her sneaking out and heading to bars and kissing every girl who said yes, but it seems more like she was chasing the thrill of it. The incident reports list her coming back with blood on her knuckles, not alcohol on her breath. "She'll probably try to start a fight, though." 

Emory tilts her head. "Let her throw a few punches, but stop it at blood?"

"Something like that." And it's weird, but hearing Emory say that, free of judgement -- a hint of understanding, even -- shoves some of the weight off Lyme's shoulders. Her girl is a Victor who has Victor issues and it's okay; everyone in the Village understands that, no matter how it manifests. "I just want to give her a bit of freedom so she doesn't choke herself trying to get it on her own."

Emory nods. "It's a good idea," she says, and Lyme waits for her to say what she's owed in return, but she doesn't. She just shakes her head, laughs a little, and scrubs a hand through her hair. "Okay, I'll do it. I'll call you when we're leaving so you know when we'll be home."

Sometimes Lyme thinks Brutus and his Victor can't possibly be human, wants to poke at them looking for wires or the transponder where they receive messages from their computer overlord, but other times she feels like she failed a basic element of Be a Good Person class and shouldn't even bother with the makeup exam. "Thanks," Lyme says, and it hits her that this is probably the longest conversation she and Emory have had in two years. "I'll buy you a case of beer or something."

"Don't worry about it," Emory says, waving a hand, and seriously? "It takes a village, right?" 

 

* * *

 

When she tells Artemisia, her girl actually does a double-take. "Wait, really? You're letting me go out alone?" 

With Emory doesn't qualify as 'alone', but the fact that she's framing that way means it's working already. "I think you're ready," Lyme says, leaving it at that. "Try not to give Emory a heart attack, though, she's Brutus' girl and we have to be careful with people like that." 

Artemisia smiles, sharp and carnivorous and terrifying, and oh dear. Even if Emory isn't asking for a bribe, Lyme bets Brutus will demand one by the end of the week. "I'll do my best, Mom," she says, batting her eyes and twirling a strand of hair around one finger. It's the most terrifying thing Lyme has ever seen her do, and this after watching her disembowel the Six boy and stand over him until the cannon fired.

"Brutus will kill me if you break her," Lyme warns, and she's rewarded when Artemisia lets out a delighted laugh. That ... probably should not have been the response, but oh well, too late now.

"Nah," Artemisia says, slinging an arm around Lyme's waist and butting her head against her shoulder while Lyme very carefully does not suck in a breath. "My mentor could kick Emory's mentor's ass."

"Just don't say that on the playground or we're all in trouble," Lyme shoots back, but she ruffles Artemisia's hair. "I totally could, though," she adds, and her Victor grins.

 

* * *

 

Friday afternoon, Artemisia hauls Lyme into her room. "Okay, sit," she says, imperiously, and Lyme raises her eyebrows and perches on the edge of the bed. "I need you to give me opinions."

Lyme almost wants to glance around and look for hidden cameras. "Opinions on what?"

"Politics," Artemisia says, deadpan, and when Lyme gives her a look she rolls her eyes. "Clothes, obviously, I'm going out, I want to look good. Everything I have is 'oh look I sleep on the couch all day and eat pasta out of the pot' clothes. Is there anything in here that's nice?"

"Uh." Lyme blinks. This is something they didn't cover in mentor training. "I'm not sure I'm the person you want to ask. I know how to dress myself and that's about it."

Artemisia stops, narrows her eyes and gives Lyme the once-over, then she claps her hands together. "Okay, fine, will Callista come over and help me, then? No offence, your look works for you, but it's not really mine."

"Thanks for that," Lyme says, bristling a little even though she's not offended or stung at all, definitely not. She's heard way worse. "Callista will put you in heels and a dress, just so you know."

"I don't have her curves so probably none of her dresses will fit, but I look killer in heels, " Artemisia says without thinking, and oh, right, normal people. "Plus I've seen hers, and she could put them through a guy's neck. Sounds good to me." She holds up a hand when Lyme flattens her stare. "No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I promise."

Lyme wouldn't be a Victor if she didn't have an appreciation for gallows humour, and she's made enough cracks about murdering people with clothing or household objects to know when someone isn't being serious. "That's fine," she says, standing and stretching her arms over her head, bending one and tugging at the elbow to loosen a knot in her shoulder. "I'll go get Callista and you two can do your thing. Meanwhile I'll go throw some heavy things around and grunt a lot."

Artemisia laughs, but then a line appears between her eyebrows and she reaches out to catch Lyme's arm. "Hey, I wasn't kidding when I said you look good, though. You're totally intimidating and it's great. I couldn't pull it off."

No relief hits Lyme between the shoulder blades, and she most definitely does not fight her mouth as it attempts to twitch into a smile. It's stupid to feel relieved that her Victor isn't mocking the clothes that make her feel the happiest about herself she's felt in years, the ones that allowed her to channel the rage and power inside her and not try to stuff herself into someone else's box. It's not a thing. Lyme doesn't care. 

She does stifle the strangest urge to tug Artemisia in close and kiss the top of her head, which, what? Instead Lyme throws an arm around her girl's shoulders and tugs at her hair. "All right, I'll go call the world's most murderous prep team."

Artemisia bares her teeth. "Not gonna go for the 'she'll make you look  _killer_ ' joke, I see," she says, and this time Lyme laughs.

"Punning wasn't my image," Lyme says, pulling out her phone.

It's good anyway, really, since the whole point of going out tonight is about Artemisia bonding with other Victors, and dressing her for the occasion is definitely better than letting Callista drag her to the Capitol to one of her bondage and fetish clubs. Lyme leaves them alone for the preparation, and she grabs her sword and heads back to Artemisia's to run through forms in the backyard while she waits.

Her arms shake by the time Artemisia emerges out the back door and poses on the porch, one hand on her hip. "Ta-da," she says, grinning, but it's a full-on, regular grin, not her nasty Arena smile or her winking camera smile or the one that smells blood, and Lyme can't help but return it. "What do you think?"

Callista put her in something tight, short, off the shoulders and missing half the back, but it's still more fabric than anything a Capitol stylist would put her in, and for Callista it's actually pretty subtle. Lyme can only assume this is meant to go under something with a lot more straps and buckles. For her exit interview Artemisia's prep team curled her hair and pinned tiny daggers to dangle between the ringlets, but Callista's left it loose, wavy and a little bit wild. She looks -- normal, happy, and even better she actually looks eighteen, not like a kid sexed up far beyond her age so the Capitol audience won't feel guilty drooling over her. For the first time since the Reaping, her clothes don't look like they're just waiting for an artistic spray of someone else's blood. 

Lyme relaxes just a hair, and Callista shoots her a thumbs up from the doorway, out of Artemisia's eye line. "You look good," Lyme says, resting the flat of the sword against the curve of her neck to give her arm a bit of a break. "But now I do have to make the 'knock 'em dead' joke or I get fined by the universe."

Artemisia just grins wider, taking the porch steps down two at a time -- in heels, no less, and Lyme could kill five different people five different ways with a broken pencil but she'd probably snap her fibula if she tried something like that. "You're the best," she says, and a glow spreads through Lyme's chest. "Seriously, the best. I'll bring you back a souvenir."

"No you will not," Lyme says, pointing her finger in an exaggerated gesture that's really only half kidding. "No stealing things from behind the bar, or from other patrons, either." She learned her lesson after Artemisia came back from Ronan's with a carved wooden bishop from his chess set in her pocket; Ronan let her get away with it three times before telling her he'd buy her a set of her own but leave his be. The Centre files didn't say anything about Artemisia being a compulsive thief, at least not more than most kids who went through a phase of smuggling out weapons for extra practice, but apparently they don't know everything.

Artemisia only beams at her, but she doesn't sass or argue, and her eyes barely flickered at the sight of Lyme holding a weapon. "Can we go get Emory?" she asks. "I know it's too early for the club, but maybe we can get dinner first."

There's a cadence to her voice there, all false-casual but with a hopeful lilt at the end that makes Lyme narrow her eyes, especially when Callista covers her mouth and lets out the world's worst cover-a-laugh cough for someone who still tops the Centre's showmanship scores decades later. "I'm sure you can," Lyme says carefully, because oh.

Two years out and Lyme is no more interested in finding someone than she was when their mentors forced her and Brutus out on a date. She absolutely refused to do the same thing with Artemisia, to scour the Village for anyone within the appropriate range of age and sexuality in the hopes that one of them will like her girl and make a happily ever after. Lyme knows absolutely nothing about Emory's tastes -- she's never gone on a date as far as Lyme knows -- but Emory would be steadying, if nothing else. 

She's not going to say anything about it either way. It wasn't a setup and the less Lyme thinks about it, the better.

"I'm gonna run in and grab a jacket," Artemisia says, disappearing back into the house, and Lyme pulls a rag from her pocket to wipe the sweat from the handle of her sword while Callista glides down to join her.

"You know, if she still looks like that at thirty, I might take her up on the offer she made me," Callista says idly, and Lyme chokes. "She's a very sweet girl." 

Not too many people would vaguely hit on someone's Victor while the mentor is standing right there with an enormous sword; Callista gets props for her guts, Lyme will give her that. That's all Lyme will give her, though, and she fixes the older woman with a hard stare. "Don't even," she says, a growl filling her words even as she tries to stop it.

"She's a decade too young at the moment, and even I have limits," Callista says mildly. "She doesn't like boys at all, by the way, that should please you. Fewer testicles for you to crush preemptively I'm sure."

Lyme pretends she didn't hear that because Callista is right, and that's just embarrassing. Even worse because Brutus would agree with the relief, and nobody needs that.

Emory agrees to dinner over the phone, answering with her usual vague pleasantness that answers absolutely no questions about whether she knows Artemisia is stealthily inviting herself on a date. Lyme runs home to drop off her sword in the meantime, trying not to think about what sort of pick-up strategies or who knows what else Callista might be giving Artemisia in the meantime. She grabs an apple from the crisper on her way out just to give herself something to do with her hands because suddenly she's restless, even though it's stupid. 

It's just an evening; Lyme hasn't had a night to herself since the Reaping, she should be happy for the chance to get something done. She could hit the Village gym for real, pound out a good solid workout and start to regain the muscle definition she's lost from the months of inadequate sleep, hasty meals and constant attention. She could even head out to town, check out the shops and get something to eat using real, metal utensils instead of plastic. It's a night of possibilities, that's what it is, and Lyme should look at it that way.

She rolls the apple around in her hands on her way back to Artemisia's house, and when she gets there Lyme rubs her fingers over the smooth skin, probing for bruises and mushy spots while Artemisia chatters. It's -- charming, almost, how animated she is, and if this goes well then they can make this a part of their weekly schedule. Snow only knows she'll need it once the Tour preparation kicks into gear for good, and starting next summer they'll have chosen Artemisia's public facade and everything she does anywhere near the possibility of a camera will have to be crafted to fit within that. Now is the best time for her to go out and have fun, kiss a few girls and knock a few heads and get some of the stir-crazy out of her system.

They sit together on the porch swing after Callista heads back to her place with her collection of clothing she brought over for Artemisia to try, and Artemisia leans her shoulder against Lyme's arm while Lyme forces herself to keep looking out over the yard. "I'm feeling good today," Artemisia says, tipping her weight into Lyme's space just a little. "It's nice."

"You're doing well," Lyme says. "I'm proud of you." The bad patches still come close together, and a good day today still might mean that tomorrow Artemisia will pull everything out of her cupboards and throw it through the kitchen window to see what Lyme will do or whether she'll get mad, but as every Victor knows, you take each day sunrise to sunrise. She takes a risk and moves her arm, stretching it out along the back of the swing, and Artemisia shifts to lean against Lyme's side. 

Artemisia tilts her head back and gives Lyme a smile that's only just a little bit shit-eating. "So, what, you're saying I'm the good kind of crazy?" 

Lyme jostles her shoulder. "Yeah, girl, that's exactly what I'm saying."

Emory shows up not long after that, bearing a screw-top glass jar filled with reddish jelly. "I made rosehip-apple jam this morning," she says, and Lyme has lived in District 2 all her damn life and she has no idea what a rosehip is or how a person should eat it. Sometimes she thinks Emory must be making things up, except that she and Brutus go camping with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a hunting knife for upwards of a week and they come back looking fed and happy, so who the hell knows.

"Thanks?" Lyme takes the jar and examines the contents. Half the Village must have kitchens stuffed with Emory's preserves, though Lyme will admit they're usually good.

"It's not as sweet as some of the fruit stuff," Emory says. "I know that's not really your thing, so I figured you might like this."

It strikes Lyme that she has no idea whether Emory likes sweet food or not, and once Artemisia is more settled in then this is probably something she should work on. Lyme doesn't make friends easily but this is ridiculous, and it can't have been easy for Emory to have a new Victor just three years down who all but ignored her existence. "Thanks," Lyme says, shifting a little. "You guys gonna head out, then?"

Emory glances at Artemisia, and her polite, neutral smile falls away to wide eyes and mild alarm when she takes in her outfit. "Wait, that's what you're wearing?"

"What's wrong with it?" Artemisia asks, her voice sharpening with defensiveness, and her fingers twitch at the edges of the jacket like she wants to pull it closed but isn't letting herself. Lyme leans her weight a little closer onto Artemisia's side.

"Nothing, but I'm definitely underdressed," Emory says, and Artemisia sits back, feathers smoothed. "Plus you look like you're going to get cold pretty fast. Weather's falling quick after dark this time of year."

Artemisia cocks her head and gives the other Victor a winning smile that Lyme is glad Brutus isn't here to see aimed at his girl. "It's okay, I'll just borrow your jacket if I get chilly."

Emory shrugs. "Sure can do. I picked a nice place to eat I thought, but looking like that everybody's gonna stare. Most people aren't going to look so nice. If you don't mind then we can walk there from here." Her eyes narrow at Artemisia's shoes. "Or I could drive." 

"Let's drive," Artemisia says, and her voice has taken on a tone that Lyme has never heard before, similar to the prey-stalking from the Arena but with a small lilt of hesitation to it. Lyme hasn't heard Artemisia be anything but certain in her life. "That way we can stay out later and not worry about walking back." 

This time Emory laughs. "Ain't nobody going to bother the two of us after hours, but well enough. Lyme, I'll call you when we're leaving, all right?"

Lyme nods, and part of her feels bad for not warning Emory when she obviously has no idea what she's in for, but them's the breaks. If it goes well then it goes well, and Lyme will be happy; if Emory isn't interested, then there's really no one better for Artemisia to suffer her first rejection than the woman who embodies all the elements of quarry manners, so full of courtesy and humility that she almost makes Brutus look rude.

"Shall we?" Artemisia asks brightly, holding out her hand, and Emory snorts and crooks her arm so Artemisia can tuck her hand into the join of her elbow.

Lyme heads back out over the yard to her house, holding the jar of jam awkwardly in both hands, because it feels too strange to stand and watch them go.

 

* * *

 

Brutus stops by an hour later with a case of beer under one arm, a bottle of brandy in one hand, and a sword belted to his waist. Lyme's fingers tighten on the edge of the doorknob. "I don't need whatever this is," she says. "I'm fine."

"I know you are," Brutus says amiably, jostling his way past her into the house and dropping the drinks on her kitchen counter while Lyme scowls. "Just thought you could use the company."

Lyme drums her fingers against her biceps. "You realize that your being nice makes me want to start checking under my pillows for spiders."

Brutus snorts, unbuckling his sword and leaning it in the corner. He drops onto the far stool at the kitchen counter and leans back against the wall, propping his feet up on the one next to him as he cracks open a beer. Apparently in the quarries they take 'make yourself at home' as a given when it suits them. "Look, first time Emory went out without me, I damn near ripped up all my flooring and put new ones down just to give myself something to do, ain't no shame in that."

"I'm not --" 

Bruus raises his eyebrows and Lyme shuts her mouth. "Plus it's been a long time since we've gotten tipsy and beaten the shit out of each other. I figure you've gotten soft, since you haven't had anybody to fight but your Arena-crazy baby Victor for the last few months. Unless you're afraid of the challenge."

Lyme stomps on the swell of gratitude and grabs a glass from the cupboard, shoving Brutus' legs off the stool with a pointed look. "You'll have to try harder than that to goad me, caveman."

Brutus takes a long pull of his beer and sets it down on the counter hard enough to thump against the polished granite. "I'm not goading anybody, I'm just sayin', I haven't had a day off training in some four years now, so I can see why you might be intimidated --"

She knows what he's doing, she isn't an idiot, but Lyme could do with the cheering up and it's not every day she gets to hear Brutus say he's missed her. Lyme flattens her eyes at him, then lifts her glass and knocks back the brandy in one go, silently apologizing to the drink for wasting its potential like it's cheap vodka. "Fuck you," she says, and she reaches under the counter for a bottle of tequila, banging it and a pair of shot glasses on the counter. "You're on, then."

"You're gonna make me drink booze from Ten?" Brutus complains, but he slides the case of beer down to the far end of the counter and grabs the salt shaker, twisting off the lid. "I'm definitely kicking your ass." 

 

* * *

 

They don't get to rip-roaring drunk, they're not stupid. Even with her anxieties keyed up, both Lyme and Brutus are mentors now, and that's flipped something in her head; around the point where they're pushing up their sleeves to compare biceps and taunt each other, Lyme's brain pings a warning. She shoves the booze away, hauls herself up from the stool, and drags both her and Brutus to the bathroom to stick their heads under the shower at its coldest setting. It leaves them soaked and sputtering and cursing, but well sober enough that grabbing their swords and heading out back to swing them around would only get them a raised eyebrow from Odin and Nero, not the full on mentor stare.

It does feel good to let go. Artemisia isn't the first Victor to have the crazy bubble up so strong it drives her to irresponsible things, and both Lyme and Brutus tried to run from theirs as soon as they could, throwing themselves into training and mentoring and actually pulling out a kid so they had no choice but to grow up fast. Lyme can't remember the last time she fought with alcohol buzzing in her system, grinning and tossing out filthy insults and cackling with triumph as Brutus' mega-adult quarry-values duty-first mask peels off and she finds the Victor underneath. Beneath all that politeness and honour he's just like her, a kid with blood on his knuckles and the Arena two steps behind. It's all shark smiles and words dredged from the deepest pit mines on the coldest Januaries, and Lyme says  _you kiss your mother with that mouth_ and Brutus flings back  _yeah well you'd know better so you tell me_ .

They end up sprawled on the lawn, Lyme with her head pillowed on Brutus' leg, digging the back of her skull into his thigh so he grunts in irritation. "It's stupid to miss her for one night," Lyme says, staring up at the stars. Here the outline of the trees are a sharp black silhouette, the clouds low on the horizon and too far down for her current vantage point.

Brutus flails a hand in her direction and ends up smacking her in the ear before he finds her head, condescendingly patting her. "Way I figure, mentoring means going a little stupid," he says, moving his hand out of reach of her teeth when Lyme twists and takes a snap at his fingers. "Parents think these little wrinkly, screaming things are the best thing in the universe, right? Same deal."

Lyme jabs him in the knee. "Maybe  _your_ Victor is a wrinkly screaming thing, but mine's perfect."

"Fuck you, sweetheart."

"Not for all the grain in Nine, asshole."

"The fuck are you gonna do with all the grain in Nine?"

"I dunno, stuff it up your ass!"

Brutus laughs, then Lyme laughs, and once the crazy dam breaks they're both cracking up right there on the lawn, bruised and still a little tipsy with their swords lying in the grass off to the side. The Centre never told her it would be like this, and if they had Lyme would have scoffed and taken out the next training dummy right in the groin because she thought all she needed was the Victory, her freedom, and a Village with a gate that locked from the inside. Now she punches Brutus in the leg to hear him grumble, and she's actually dozing off on him when her phone buzzes in her pocket.

"We're heading back," Emory says in Lyme's ear, and Lyme sits up and combs bits of grass and dirt out of her hair from the time Brutus took her down. Lyme strains to pick up Emory's tone, but there's too much background noise, people shouting and laughing and the music thumping overhead. "I'm driving back, so less than half an hour."

Lyme thanks her, then heaves herself up and gives Brutus a hand so he can slap it away and mutter about uppity girls trying to make him feel old. They bring the swords inside, and Lyme takes down a bottle of anti-hangover pills and tosses one to Brutus before crunching hers dry. Brutus rolls his eyes and pours himself a glass of water to drink with his.

"I think Artemisia likes Emory," Lyme says while they wait on the porch, glancing over at Brutus. She braces to punch him if he says her girl isn't good enough for his, but he just clicks his tongue against the roof his mouth, thoughtfully.

"Hope it ain't serious," he says finally. "Emory and me, we've talked about it. Dunno if it's the Program or the Arena or what, but she's not into that."

"Girls?" Lyme asks, because fair enough, neither is she, which made for a confusing adolescence when she couldn't decide whether she wanted to kiss boys, break their necks, or both.

"Anything," Brutus says neutrally, and he runs a hand over his face. The buzz from the tequila and the rush from the fight are fading, and Lyme is alternately shaky and crashing; Brutus looks the same. 

He doesn't give details, and Lyme doesn't ask. Emory wouldn't be the only one to come out of the Arena without a desire for sex or relationships, and maybe it's less complicated that way. "Here's hoping she cuts that off before it spreads I guess," Lyme says. "Artemisia can -- fixate."

"Hadn't noticed," Brutus says dryly, but he holds up a hand when Lyme goes to sock him. "No, I get it, but Emory's not cruel, or stupid. She'll figure it out and she'll shut it down, and she won't turn to stone if your girl hits on her. It'll be fine."

They fall silent after that, and not long after the sound of Artemisia's laughter floats up over the trees. It's not the wild, half-crazed cackling of a Victor who's tasted blood that night, and Lyme exhales and loosens her fingers from their death grip on her knees. She stands up and dusts off her jeans before Emory and Artemisia round the path. 

Artemisia is wearing Emory's jacket and Emory's arm is around her waist, and for a second Lyme thinks Brutus might have made a miscalculation except then they step into the orange glow of the porch light and never mind. Artemisia is grinning, but Emory wears the face of someone who's spent an entire afternoon picking up a rabbit and carrying it out from the middle of the road, only for it to turn around and dash back in.

"There," Emory says with exaggerated patience, and she peels Artemisia's arm from her shoulders and all but dumps her in Lyme's lap. "We're home now."

Lyme gives her a sharp glance, but there's no alcohol smell emanating from Artemisia's breath or clothes, and when she tips back her head to grin at Lyme her gaze is clear. "Did you have fun?"

"I got in a fight," Artemisia says, beaming, and Emory snorts and flops down onto the porch step beside Brutus, who gives her a pat on the shoulder. "It was great. I stopped before blood, too, just like Emory said, just hit him in the throat and he went down like a little Six." 

"Oh?" Lyme rubs her fingers over Artemisia's scalp, ignoring the turn of phrase that will most definitely be trained out of her before the Tour. "What else?"

"I kissed all the girls," Artemisia says. She closes her eyes and lets out a happy sigh, stretching out her foot and resting it on the railing. "Alllllll of the girls."

"Yes she did," says Emory, sounding drained but not judging, so there's that. "Even the straight ones. More than one will be going home confused tonight."

"Well, wouldn't you?" Artemisia asks, but then she laughs and points one finger back over her head. "No, wait, I asked and you wouldn't. Did you know Emory doesn't like girls? No boys either. What a waste."

Lyme flicks her between the eyes. "Hey. Nobody is a waste just because they won't kiss you, and Emory is right there."

Emory presses thumb and forefinger to the inside corners of her eye sockets. "It's fine, we had a nice talk and a few drinks and everything was -- fine."

Artemisia wrinkles her nose. "Emory would only let me have two beers. Two beers! And no shots. I could've drunk so much more."

"And then been in no shape to throw any punches, much less kiss any girls," Lyme points out, and against her will she's charmed by the thinking frown that wrinkles Artemisia's forehead. "Good night, though?" 

"Yes," Artemisia proclaims finally. "Yes, yes, definitely. I want to do it again."

Emory sighs, just a little, but then she smiles. "Sure, let's do it next week," she says. "But you're bringing your own coat."

Artemisia chuckles to herself as Brutus and Emory take their leave. "She didn't know it was a date, and I didn't know it wasn't," she says after, and Lyme freezes but her expression stays on the wistful side and never crosses over into anger or bitterness. "We got all the way through dinner. She held the door, she got my chair, she even glared at some noisy guys outside to fuck off. She figured it out when I asked her to dance, though." She sighs, then brightens. "Too bad, she's really pretty, but there were lots of pretty girls there."

Lyme doesn't really want to hear about this, and so she tugs Artemisia to her feet and starts them back on the path toward her house. "I'm glad you had a good time."

"It was a good idea," Artemisia says, only stumbling once when her heels snag on a pine cone. "I guess mentors aren't always spoilsports."

"I guess we aren't," Lyme says, and her Victor snickers and knocks her head against Lyme's shoulder.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brutus and Lyme getting drunk and "I love you, man" through swords and punching is one of my guilty pleasures, I must say.


	5. Break Me, Shake Me, Hate Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Down, girl," Lyme says in Artemisia's ear, even as the escort howls about the blood trickling down the side of her face from where a pointed edge struck her. "Come on. Don't give them the satisfaction."_
> 
> Artemisia practically waltzed her way through the Arena. The Victory Tour, not so much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Panem had the internet and social justice activists wouldn't be murdered in their sleep, the rallying cry for this chapter would be "check your privilege". There's a lot of stuff here said by both Lyme and Artemisia that is going to make fans of the outer districts cringe, but that's how it goes.
> 
> Essentially, Lyme and Artemisia are very young, very lucky, and very sheltered. They don't stay that way for long, but for now they are. Just try to keep that in mind.
> 
> Warnings for Lyme's issues with rape, pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood. People who've read 'Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice' will know where this comes from.

The distant sound of shattering glass tears Lyme out of sleep. Outside the snow falls in a gentle flurry, fat white flakes that pile up on the windowsill and blanket the yard in a soft carpet. It muffles the normal nighttime sounds of the Village, but it doesn't stop the curses and shrieks and clattering as metal hits wood from carrying across the yard.

No prizes for guessing whose house, and Lyme leaps out of bed and pulls on her coat and boots before she's even fully awake, nearly slamming into the door in her hurry. The snow is too dry to form the nice crisp crust over top, and instead of crunching through the layers Lyme's feet sink down like she's walking through foot-deep sand, making her swear with each step as she lifts her boot and shakes the excess free.

The sounds only increase in volume as Lyme approaches Artemisia's house. Snow only knows what set her off after a month or so without incident, but Lyme bets it has to do with the upcoming Tour.

"Hey girl," Lyme calls out carefully, opening the front door slowly in case Artemisia is waiting with a bevy of items to throw at her head. But no, another crash comes from further inside, and Lyme slips in quickly, kicking off her boots and flinging her coat aside. Her arm gets stuck in the sleeve, pulling it inside-out, and Lyme nearly rips the whole thing off in her haste to make it to the source of the noise.

It's the living room, which is at least better than the kitchen since Artemisia graduated, possibly prematurely, from plastic dishes just last week. Lyme edges around the corner and winces at the sight; her Victor has thrown everything she can into the television, smashing the projector so that the image still flickering on the wall is now distorted and stretched, the colours inverted. Lyme squints at it, trying to make it out, but then she thinks she catches Caesar Flickerman's gigantic grin, terrifying with his teeth in black instead of shining white.

"You could change the channel," Lyme suggests, and Artemisia whirls on her, eyes wide and bloodshot, hands fisted in her hair. "What's going on?"

It takes Artemisia a long time to come down enough to talk. Lyme takes a step forward, then another -- her girl shies back, nostrils flaring, flinging up a hand, making Lyme pause for a few seconds -- but finally Lyme reaches her and pries her fingers loose. "Tell me," Lyme says, encircling Artemisia's wrist with her hand and rubbing her thumb over the tattoo as a reminder.

"I was watching interviews," Artemisia says, speaking slowly like someone trying to piece together a dream before the morning sun burns it away. "I thought -- the Tour is coming, and I don't remember a lot of what happened when I was in the Capitol, or how they spun it. I thought I'd get the jump on my image."

Lyme doesn't bother to tell her that it's the mentor's job to craft that, not the fresh young Victor's; nor does she point out that at this hour it's more likely that Artemisia couldn't sleep and decided to turn on the television to take her mind off the insomnia and just happened upon some repeat footage. Lyme didn't watch a lot of the post-Arena interviews, either; with Artemisia safe, Lyme's priorities shifted to making sure her girl got through the parties and appearances without stabbing anyone before they could take her home.

Artemisia flexes her fist, trying to break Lyme's grip, and Lyme shifts to pin her against the wall, one arm hard against her throat. Artemisia fights her for a second, then sags, her mentor's weight pressing her back, and Lyme hated Nero when he did this but it always settled her into place. "What did you see?" she asks. "What did they say?"

Artemisia shudders, eyes rolling to the side. "There was an interview with all the mentors, after. While I was sleeping, I guess. A whole bunch of mentors in a line on stage, live footage."

She falters, and Lyme nods to draw her out again. "They do that," Lyme says, encouraging. "All the mentors who aren't too drunk or drugged or what, they comment on the victory, say nice things about the kid who won." She bites the inside of her lip. "What did they say?"

"Not nice things," Artemisia says with a harsh laugh. "They played some bullshit, the Six mentor -- not even live, I don't know where he was but he didn't bother to show -- saying before the Games that his kid deserved to win the most, and if anyone else won then he'd be surprised because his boy wanted it more. Bullshit!"

"Total bullshit," Lyme agrees, though it's not personal. All the mentors say that -- Lyme certainly had -- because it's part of the dance they all do. No mentor can show doubt on camera, especially an outlier with maybe one or two chances per decade to bring one home. "But he's not going to say anything else about his boy."

Artemisia shakes her head, and she leans back so her skull thunks against the wall. "I know, I don't really care about that. It wasn't him, anyway, it was Flickerman."

This time Lyme goes cold. "What did Flickerman say?"

The master of ceremonies is supposed to be objective; he gets paid ridiculous amounts to provide neutral commentary, to help all the tributes through their interviews as best he can, and when the Victor crosses the stage he's meant to act as though no one else ever even existed. It doesn't always happen that way, though; he has his favourites, and once or twice since Lyme was old enough to pay attention to the overall coverage he's backed a loser. Emory's year he'd favoured the boy from Five. If he'd done the same thing this year --

Artemisia laughs again, the sound rasping across Lyme's bones. "He said -- he showed that clip, of the Six mentor saying his boy deserved it, and then he stopped. He just, he said some shit about how it speaks for itself, but then he smiled and he started talking about what kind of dress I'd wear onstage like nobody would notice. He wanted Six to win and he said so! He's not supposed to care, he's supposed to be happy for me." Her hands come up to grip Lyme's forearm, fingers digging in and leaving small crescents in her skin. "They're supposed to be happy."

Lyme briefly entertains the image of ripping out Flickerman's garish white teeth, but she soon snaps out of it. "That was then," she says. "They were buoyed up on the drama, that's all. It's been six months and you're their Victor, that's what matters."

"They're supposed to love me!" Artemisia bursts out. "I played their Games, I followed the rules, I did everything you told me. I gave them a better show than that asshole with his crying and his bedtime stories. So why?"

It must be a bad night if her girl is giving a shit about rules and fairness. Instead of answering, Lyme steps back, then knocks her down and pins her flat on the ground, using her weight to hold her girl's arms against the floor. "They don't love us," Lyme says. "That's just the way it goes. They'll want to come to all the parties and take all the pictures with us, and they admire us and fantasize about us and want to fuck us, but they don't _love_ us. They don't love anyone." Artemisia struggles, and Lyme bears down. "But I do." 

It's a risk -- not even Nero said that to Lyme, and if he had she would've jumped right out the window -- but the words pry themselves out of her before Lyme can stop them. Artemisia leans back as far as the floor will let her, and she lets out a half-hysterical screech. "I bet you say that to all the girls." 

Lyme says nothing, just holds on, and finally Artemisia stops fighting her and flops down, letting her head fall to the side. "People are going to say shit," Lyme says, matter of fact. "People will always say shit. But your trick is not to let it reach you, because the people who say shit, they are shit. The ones who matter are right here, and nothing you do will change that." 

Artemisia closes her eyes. "I think I want my drugs now."

Lyme waits a moment, weighing her options -- drag her up for a full-on sparring match, keep saying it until she understands -- but it's late at night and her girl is crazy-eyed and exhausted and for once it's a better idea not to push it. "Okay," she says. She stands up, helps pull Artemisia to her feet, then leads her to the kitchen and gives her a single dose of sleeping pills and watches as she swallows them down. Then she leads Artemisia back to her room, sits on the edge of her bed and strokes her forehead while the girl stares at the wall until her eyelids droop.

Lyme slips downstairs to clean up the mess in the living room, sweeping up the broken glass and electronics and setting the furniture back to rights. Sometimes she and Artemisia clean up together -- it's good therapy, taking a mess you've made and putting things into place again -- but in this case, she makes the judgement call start tomorrow fresh. Once that's done, Lyme pulls a spare blanket and pillow from the cupboard, then stretches out on the floor beside Artemisia's bed and allows herself to doze. 

The next morning, Lyme wakes when Artemisia sling her legs over the side of the bed and actually steps on her. "The hell?" Artemisia asks, scrubbing a hand over her face. Her hair sticks out in wild directions, and she stifles a yawn with her palm. "What are you doing?" 

"Keeping the monsters away," Lyme says flippantly, sitting up to stretch away the soreness. She's slept on far worse, and here she didn't even have to worry about keeping one eye open for venomous snakes like in her Arena, but the mind and body both acclimatize to safety and comfort with alarming speed. "You want breakfast?"

"Sure," Artemisia says, pausing only a little. "I want eggs benedict."

"You'll get scrambled," Lyme says, shooting her a look because no way in hell does she have the skill for any meal that fiddly, but then her girl's mouth twitches. Ah, good. "But I'll throw in some vegetables to make it fancy." 

"Gosh, Mom, not vegetables, how will I ever handle the thrill," Artemisia drawls, pulling her shirt over her head and throwing it in the corner before sauntering over to the dresser. She's reaction-seeking, every motion tightly controlled even as she tries to make them look nonchalant, and Lyme waits until she changes clothes before pinning her to the floor again. Artemisia fights her more than she did last night, nails dragging down Lyme's forearms and leaving long welts that bead up with blood where she tore the skin, but in the end she slumps and closes her eyes. 

"Twice in one day and it's not even breakfast," Artemisia says, voice carefully neutral as Lyme pushes down with her arm. "You're gonna get sick of this."

Lyme just shakes her head. "Try me," she says, and from the ugly flash in Artemisia's eyes she knows she will. It's December and her girl still doesn't trust her not to give up, but this isn't about Lyme and her feelings so she takes her insecurity and shoves it back. Day by day, sunrise to sunrise, and the only thing she can do is be here every time until it sinks in. "C'mon you, let's eat."

 

* * *

 

They call Lyme in for an extra mentor training session the week before the Tour. Callista offers to take Artemisia for the day -- they'll be sewing outfits for her cats, she says primly, Octavius needs a new Peacekeeper uniform after he tore the last one in a fight with Miss Priscilla -- and Lyme is surprised to see Artemisia perk up with interest. They chose metalworking for her public Talent, borrowed a forge from one of the smiths down in the merchant quarters and Artemisia spent a day melting and reshaping for her gallery exhibition in the Capitol, but her girl hasn't shown much of an interest in anything for herself.

Making cat clothes would be a fucking weird Talent, but since Callista has roped Nero and his woodworking into making little beds for them -- not to mention bribing Lyme with high-quality booze to take portrait sessions of the fuzzy little monsters -- maybe this just makes it a weird Village tradition. Either way, Artemisia starts poking through the pile of fabrics and threads with enthusiasm, and Lyme smiles at Callista before escaping. 

They warn her that the Tour will be bad. Lyme sits through a whole day of statistics and possibilities and tactics until she feels like she did as a thirteen-year-old the night before her Centre Exam, except this test is real life and has far worse consequences than failing the Program. She doesn't fight it, just listens and takes notes and tries to remember everything she can, and by the time she's done Lyme is if not confident then at least not terrified. She loves her girl and they can do this; everyone knows the Tour is awful, but it's only two weeks. Artemisia was in the Arena for longer. It'll be all right.

Lyme holds onto that until they're walking across the stage in Twelve and a lump of coal flies from the audience and hits Artemisia right in the head.

It should never have reached her, except that Lyme as the mentor is supposed to stand at the back of the stage, and Artemisia's reflexes are sluggish from the drugs Lyme forced her to take on the train to keep her steady. The rock falls to the ground, rolling across the concrete, and silence stretches out for several seconds while everyone tries to register what happened. Then it snaps and everything explodes at once; Peacekeepers push through the crowd toward the thrower, who stands alone as the others nearly fall over in their haste to get away; then Artemisia lunges for the front of the stage and Lyme takes off running, catching her under the arms and hauling her back before she makes it. Behind her, Haymitch Abernathy lets out a half-amused half-shocked 'well, shit'. 

"Down, girl," Lyme says in Artemisia's ear, even as the escort howls about the blood trickling down the side of her face from where a pointed edge struck her. "Come on. Don't give them the satisfaction."

Just like that the rage falls from Artemisia's expression, and she stops fighting Lyme's hold to stand up straight, head up high and arms at her sides. Lyme lets her go but stays close this time, just behind her shoulder, and glares out at the remaining crowd with her best Arena face. Anyone who makes eye contact with Lyme shies away, turning pale beneath the layers of soot and grime, and the outliers might snort at Two for being cosseted Capitol lapdogs but Lyme hopes they take a good look at her, with her un-pretty face and her muscles and remember exactly what she and her fellow Victors did to earn her people that privilege. Not all Lyme's kills were aided with weapons, and she damn well hopes they remember that.

(The memories of a child's neck snapping under her fingers may as well be good for something.)

Artemisia, mountains and earth bless her, takes her speech from start to finish. It's the standard spiel, written by their escort and double-checked by Lyme to keep it in character for their district, thanking the tributes and the people of Twelve for their honour and their sacrifice. She says it even with the trickle of blood freezing and congealing against her skin, and she keeps every sneer and snarl and lackadaisical wink inside, leaving behind nothing but the same fierce district pride that she tends to mock in private.

They're unmoved, of course they are -- it's just words to them, nothing honourable or worthy about pride from a trained killer, easy to be proud with no one stepping on your throat, Lyme has heard all of it hissed at her, back in the day -- but the point is that Artemisia didn't let them beat her. She and her girl walk back into the Justice Building together, and Lyme doesn't hug her when the doors close but only because she still needs to be on her game with the mayor and Twelve's only Victor staring at her.

Their escort cancels most of the day's engagements in a huff, leaving nothing but the lunch with Haymitch Abernathy because the meal has already been prepared and they're certainly not going to feed it to the citizens instead. The prep team flutters around Artemisia with bandages and liquid skin, but she bats them away, sending them flapping back and squealing.

"Leave it," Artemisia snaps. "It's a rock to the head, not an axe." 

Lyme can't tell if Artemisia meant it or not -- she was too young for Residential during the Quarter Quell, meaning she wouldn't have sat through the detailed analysis with the trainers, but the 50 th 's final moments make the 'most memorable' recaps every single year -- and she can't help stealing a glimpse at Abernathy. District Twelve's sole living Victor doesn't blink either way, just drops into his seat at the table and pours himself a glass of blood-red wine.

"Bon appetit," he says, lifting his glass, and drains half of it in one go.

Artemisia stares down at her plate, jaw clenched, and she curls her fingers around the handles of her silverware but doesn't take a bite. Tension hums in the air, and Lyme keeps her attention on her Victor, waiting for a sign that her girl is going to snap. Emory is the calmest of their Victors and arguably the most sane, but even she wouldn't be expected to sit through a pleasant meal after having something chucked at her head. With luck they'll only have to stay a little while longer.

Abernathy narrows his eyes and leans back, swilling the rest of the wine. "What," he drawls, his Twelve accent rough around the edges, and Lyme sits up straight, smelling blood. "You'll kill our kids but you're too good to eat our food?" 

Lyme hisses a breath and reaches out to forestall Artemisia from whatever she's going to do, but her girl jerks her hand away and remains still. "I didn't kill your tributes," Artemisia says icily. "That was Four and One, and I killed those two myself."

"Ah, right, my mistake," Abernathy says, giving her a sharp, grey-eyed glance. The commenters tittered about his good looks back in the day ( _so handsome_ for someone from the Seam, not a filthy coal-miner at all!) and he's grown into them since, now that he's a well-fed man of twenty-three instead of a half-starved teenager. He might not be trained but he is a killer, and he knows how to work a crowd. Lyme sits back, ready to intervene to keep her girl safe; a dinner knife might not have the right balance for throwing, but that doesn't mean he might not try. "You didn't kill my kids, but you did whine about how my boy was going to keep you awake all night with his screaming. Y'know, after your district partner kept peeling his skin off." 

And the thing is -- Lyme had almost forgotten.

She'd focused on the tributes Artemisia actually killed herself, since those had the most impact on her performance, and at the time she'd shut out the other mentors entirely, so worried about the Pack breaking and whether Artemisia would make it out safely. She hadn't paid attention to Haymitch at all, except that thirteen days in would have marked a record for any Twelve since Abernathy himself. The girl had gone out in the bloodbath, but the boy had stayed hidden for almost two weeks, only to suffer the most agonizing death of this year's Arena at the hands of a Two -- and Lyme hadn't even thought about it, hadn't prepared Artemisia for the vitriol that the boy's death would set loose.

But Artemisia only frowns, blinking in genuine confusion. "What?" she blurts out, baffled. "That was an act. I was just trying to get Luca to finish the job. I didn't mean it." 

Abernathy's face slowly turns a dark shade of red. "Oh, well then," he snarls. "I'm sure that would've been a huge comfort to Micah while he bled to death, knowing you only  _pretended_ to be annoyed after letting him be tortured for hours. That makes me feel so much better." 

Shit.

Sure enough, Artemisia's expression deepens into a scowl. "It's true! Nothing in the Arena is real, you should know that. You had a girl back home but you played up that romance with your district partner for the cameras, right? So don't glare at me."

Lyme grabs Artemisia by the arm and is dragging her out of the room before Abernathy finishes leaping out of his chair. The escorts titter at each other, likely trading apologies and accusations until they both pass out from lack of air, but Lyme says nothing, only hauls Artemisia out through the back of the building toward the waiting train.

To her credit, Artemisia doesn't fight or even argue on the way there, waiting until the door slides shut behind them with a quiet  _whoosh_ before wrenching herself free and whirling on Lyme, angry red blotches blooming on her cheeks and spreading across her throat. "What?" she demands. "He started it! His stupid district started it. Someone kills a Two every year and you don't see us throwing fucking rocks or insulting people!"

Lyme shakes her head. "Artemisia --"

"And I didn't kill his stupid kid, either! I didn't even torture him! That was all Jasper, and if we're going to start paying for our district partners' kills then we could at least get their tally added to ours so we can double the score." Artemisia stalks the width of the car, twisting the plush carpet beneath her boots when she turns. "If he wants to blame me for playing the game then that's his business, but I don't have to sit and take it --"

"Artemisia!" Lyme snaps, and finally her Victor stops and glowers at her. "I'm not arguing any of that, all right, but I need to tell you something. I should have mentioned it before --" but she's never done this before, never done any of this before, and she keeps making mistakes, keeps forgetting, and what if one of her slip-ups gets her girl killed -- "but you don't ever, ever talk about another Victor's Games."

Artemisia folds her arms. "Why not? We all saw them."

"Yes." Lyme holds out one hand. "But only they lived them. Only the Victor knows what's real and what wasn't. You don't know what he felt about his district partner and it's not your place to throw it in his face like that."

Artemisia sets her jaw. "He didn't have the right to throw Jasper and his toys at me, either."

"No. He didn't." Lyme almost takes a step toward her, but Artemisia is skittish and touchy and so she reconsiders and keeps her position. "But we're Two, and that means we have a reputation. We rise above."

Artemisia curls her lip. "Now you're going to tell me that the mountains endure."

It's an old Two saying, one that Lyme has heard enough times in her life to want to make her jump out a window too. "They do," she says. "But more than that, we're Victors. Country before self, duty before life, and we don't talk about any Victor's Games, or their personal lives, unless they bring it up. All right? Outliers or not, they're all Victors and they deserve their privacy, at least from us." 

She doesn't mention the rumours that have floated around the Village about Abernathy and his girl back home. Artemisia will find that out soon enough, and now is not the time.

Artemisia hisses. "Fine," she says mutinously. "But I'm not apologizing." 

"Nobody's asking you to apologize," Lyme says, and Artemisia heaves a short breath through her nose. "And I'm not apologizing for Abernathy, either, he knew what he'd get when he poked a jumpy Victor and he did it anyway. But we have eleven more districts to go, and most of them are going to be angry. Some of them will want to take it out on you, and they'll look for any excuse to justify it. Remember what I said on stage and don't give it to them."

Artemisia stares at her for a long second -- her shoulders tense, and for a second Lyme thinks she's going to lose it and sweep the entire carafe of wine right off the beverage tray -- but then she tilts her head back. "Rise above," she echoes, with only the slightest sardonic twist. "All right then."

Lyme very carefully does not sigh in relief, and a moment later their escort bursts through the door, blustering and sputtering 'well I never' and expounding on the ill manners of the outer districts, her face a very non-cosmetic shade of scarlet. Artemisia composes herself into a study of nonchalance and drops onto the sofa, dangling her legs over the edge, and Lyme makes a mental note to give her stronger sedatives tomorrow.

 

* * *

 

That night one of the train aides hands Lyme a message printed on the presidential stationery. The paper sits heavy in her hand, smelling faintly of a decaying garden because apparently the man can run a nation but not invest in scents that don't conjure up death. A tripping of fear starts up in Lyme's chest, and the edge of the envelope slices the pad of her thumb and smears blood all up the linen finish by the time she pulls out the card inside.

The man who threw the coal has been dealt with, the note says, and gives no further details other than to say that President Snow hopes Artemisia has not been shaken too badly by the ordeal.

Lyme tries to dredge up sympathy for the man who lost his life over a stupid foolish impulse, but no matter how deep she digs, she comes up with nothing. He hurt her girl, end of story, and while Lyme would not have asked that he be shot or hanged or whatever example they made from him, she's not sorry.

Artemisia doesn't think to ask, Lyme doesn't tell her, and the train keeps moving south.

 

* * *

 

Lyme hadn't given much thought to how the Victory Tour would feel as a mentor rather than as a Victor.

By the time they pass Eight and the train takes its sharp curve north to the rolling pines of Seven, Lyme is choking down food and tossing awake at night, wishing she could take one of the small pills she keeps on her person for Artemisia, but she can't. Victors are allowed to pass through their Tour in a vague haze -- it's recommended, even, since while it might make them confused and irritable now when their dosages run together, in later years the memories will fade and leave them with nothing but a vague sense of unease. Mentors, on the other hand, can't afford to be anything that will take off their edge. Mentors can't slip sideways and disappear during a meal, staring at the table and pushing the tines of their fork into the vegetables again and again.

Mentors have to see everything, hear everything, be everywhere, and it's not like the Games, when they have a partner and sometimes a backup on the floor to help spread the weight. This is all Lyme all on her own, and while she's armed with weeks of training and a last armful of advice from her fellow mentors, it's entirely different to do it.

"Sleep when she sleeps," Brutus told her before they left. "You're gonna be tempted to call ahead, check the arrangements or confirm security or engagements one more time, but don't. You need the rest. Can't help her if you're ragged."

Lyme had raised her eyebrows at him and stolen his beer to take a swig from it before making a face and passing it back. "Isn't that what they say about babies?"

Brutus shrugged. "I don't know anything about babies, I'm just telling you what you're gonna want to do and what you need to do." 

Both Nero and the training sessions confirmed Brutus' advice, and so on the tour Lyme waits until the meds take Artemisia down for the night, then stretches out on the floor in front of the door. It's stupid, and if Artemisia were awake enough to notice she would likely take offence and try to find something heavy to throw -- when Lyme was a Victor she would have pitched a royal fit if she'd caught Nero napping in her room -- but her own compartment in the mentor's car is so far away. It's better when she can let the even, drugged cadence of Artemisia's breathing lull her to sleep, waking whenever it changes and alerts her to a nightmare.

Artemisia doesn't like to talk about her nightmares, and if Lyme wants to know what happened she has to get her while she's still in the grips of them, half-mad and babbling, but from what Lyme gathers, they're not about the Arena at all. They're about the Tour itself, the walls of blank, judging faces, the hatred that rolls off them as strongly as the sour stench of unwashed bodies or the industrial chemicals belching from the factories behind. It's the people, not the dead tributes, who creep into her room and peel back her eyelids to stare at her while she begs them to go away.

The districts, as far as Lyme can tell, don't give a shit about Six personally -- they'd be hard pressed to get his name right, even -- but they're united in one thought. Anyone, from any district, is better than a Career, and Artemisia with her languid arrogance and sly winks at the camera even with hunger and exhaustion sharpening her cheekbones is one of the worst kinds.

They don't hate her, they hate what she represents, but there's no telling that to Artemisia when she's shaking in the middle of the night and sobbing with indignant rage. They don't have to love her out here -- that's for the Capitol, the people who made her and cheered for her -- but, she says into Lyme's shoulder one night, do they have to make it personal? Someone wins every year, and their kids would be just as dead if Six won. Why are they so angry it's her?

Lyme doesn't answer, just holds her until she's down again, and in the mornings any attempts to talk about it are met with a stonewalled silence or an artificially easy change of subject, so she lets it slide.

 

* * *

 

Seven is a break from the seething resentment that came before it, which is almost funny given that Artemisia took out both their tributes in the first five minutes and called out "Hey I got a set!" to the others while they tallied up the kills. But their kids died fast, barely enough time for the freeze of terror to wear off, and neither of them had a chance. 

The people of Seven are practical, concerned with making it through the freezing winter and making their logging quotas. They don't hate her, they just want her gone so they can get back to work, and the Victors at the lunch are pragmatic about their loss, the sort of grim, grinning morbid cheer that comes from years of taking the edge off their anger with a few choice bottles. Artemisia and Blight actually manage to trade a few token jokes back and forth, then Lyme bundles her back on the train. She sleeps better that night.

 

* * *

 

And then -- Six.

They spar a lot on the way there as Artemisia insists she's fine and Lyme pushes until she snaps. She remembers Nero doing the same, remembers hating him for it too, for being right and giving her the muscle aches to prove it, but now she sees. The mentor is always in charge, and while that's strangling and frustrating for the Victor a lot of the time, it's a relief when everything falls out from the bottom but someone's there to stop the fall.

Artemisia doesn't understand that yet, but as the forests thin out and the turbines and power plants flash past -- Lyme will never understand why they waste so much time circling the districts to hit them in reverse numerical order, but oh well -- she will, and soon.

The District Six Justice Building doors are not the large, elaborately carved and decorated wood like they are in Two. Here they're plain metal, unpolished, and open outward with a hiss of hydraulics and locks that click into place when closed. Lyme stands on the stage next to Artemisia, muscles tense as the exhausted, sallow-skinned crowd shuffles on the hardtop in front of them.

Usually the crews clear out the square and hand-pick the participants, choosing the ones who are less obviously addicts and pickpockets. This year it's more of a mix, several people listing sideways or leaning on each other, one or two singing in a corner, and one optimistic man slipping between them attempting to lift their likely-empty wallets or more-likely drug stashes before a Peacekeeper grasps him by the arm and leads him away. They stare at Artemisia in silence, dull-eyed incomprehension in the eyes of the morphlings and a grim-jawed bitterness on the factory workers' faces. 

Even more than their tribute's death, the lack of a Victor means no Parcel Days. Some of them had likely been tallying up the food they would get and imagining how much morphling they could trade for it -- the factory workers who stayed clean could have put a bit of their salary away each month -- but now they have nothing.

Lyme doesn't care as long as she gets Artemisia out of here in one piece. The mayor goes through his speech with a practiced mix of resignation and enforced cheer, Six's escort makes a few ill-timed jokes that fall with a thud over the unresponsive audience, and through it all Phillips stands steady and silent across the stage.

Artemisia says her speech with a Career's doggedness, no cards required, but her acting has gone flat, all her trademark expression and insouciance sucked away by the glassy eyes and smoke-filled air and grey slush that clings to her boots. Lyme clasps her hands behind her back to stop from giving Artemisia a comforting hand on her shoulder, and she holds her breath until Artemisia reaches the end of her speech and steps back without her customary flourish.

Silence. Then, from the centre of the square -- "Murderer!"

Artemisia twitches, and the crowd ambles sideways to reveal a dark-haired woman in factory greys. "My girl is dead because of you!"

Jasper killed the female tribute, not Artemisia, and this is a pattern that Lyme is not looking forward to seeing continued. Lyme grits her teeth and steps forward to get Artemisia out of here, but her girl speaks first. "The entire country honours your daughter's sacrifice," she says in perfect form, but it won't be enough. It never is, for these people.

"She wasn't a tribute!" the woman shouts, and oh no. Oh no. "Georgie was going to marry her, take her out of all this, and now she's dead! Left the house one day and walked right into traffic -- all because of you!" 

This time Phillips flinches, but Lyme doesn't have the capacity to pay him more than sidelong attention. Where are the Peacekeepers? Why is this still going? How is the woman still talking when she should have been dragged away long before now?

Unbidden, the president's words hiss in Lyme's ear:  _Favour is a wonderful thing, Ms. Lyme, but it is also ephemeral._ It could just be lax security -- rumours have it that Peacekeepers in Six make deals with the cartels to get some of the better drugs for themselves -- but it could be something else, too. A reminder that the Capitol wants humility above all else and Artemisia had better deliver.

A chant starts up around the woman from those not too addled with morphling to take it up --  _murderer, murderer, murderer_ \-- and that's enough. Artemisia's expression has shuttered off, gone into her recovery mode of studied blankness as evidenced on the giant screens at the far end, and Lyme will have to work to pull her out of it tonight and she's not staying to hear any more. Finally the Peacekeepers move, and Lyme closes her hand around Artemisia's arm and tugs her back into the building.

She ignores the muffled sounds of the riot outside and tips Artemisia's head up. "You with me?" she asks, but Artemisia's eyes slide away from hers and she swears under her breath. 

Phillips enters after them, and the locks slide into place behind him as the doors close. Lyme straightens out her fingers, forcing herself to unclench her fists and slow her breathing, but while he's solemn and the lines of his face are taut, he looks at Artemisia with a studied thoughtfulness. "Congratulations," he says finally, holding out his hand, and Lyme is an expert on sarcasm but while Phillips' voice isn't brimming with enthusiasm, he at least isn't mocking her.

Artemisia takes a tiny breath, then shakes his hand. She's haggard, and her shoulders must be aching from holding them in a proud position for so long, but she only nods because she's perfect and after the Tour is over Lyme will rearrange the skies to make sure no one ever hurts her again. "He fought well," she says.

Phillips' face spasms with anger at the well-worn line, and Lyme doesn't bother to tell him that from Artemisia it's almost a compliment. Six might have spent most of his Games telling stories, but he did give it his all at the end, and that's something. 

Suddenly Lyme can't take it anymore, all the small talk, all the artificiality, and she catches Phillips' eye. "We're not staying," she says, and let the escorts fight it out but she can't sit through another painful lunch watching Artemisia retreat further into herself now that even her persona has been stripped away. Phillips just nods and walks away without responding, and Lyme hooks her hand around Artemisia's elbow and leads her away.

She gives her girl an extra dose of sedatives once they're on the train, and Artemisia goes down almost immediately. For once Lyme doesn't stay, but goes back to her own compartment and shuts the door behind her, wishing as always that they were allowed locks. Capitol doors, be they on the train or in the Games Complex, only ever fasten from the outside. She collapses down onto her bed and drops her forehead onto her knees, legs pulled up against her chest. 

Lyme's father had gotten Lyme's mother pregnant at fourteen, and she never let her unwanted daughter forget it. Lyme spent her childhood and early adolescence terrified of the thought of some parasite growing inside her without her permission, breaking out of her in a bizarre ritual she didn't understand but that her mother called the most painful, humiliating, and horrible experience of her life. She only relaxed once the Centre gave her shots to protect her from the possibility, and even now Lyme can't think about childbirth without a shudder. Even after winning and all the protections afforded her, Lyme has never let a man fuck her and she never, ever will.

If she'd gotten pregnant in a district that didn't have that sort of system in place -- either the means to prevent it from happening or to terminate in case of an accident -- Lyme would have walked into traffic, too.

She hadn't really given much thought to Six since Artemisia's Victory. He was the one who couldn't keep it in his pants until he and his girl were free from the Reaping, even though there are plenty of ways to get off without the danger of making a tiny human. He was the one who then made promises he didn't know he could keep, who thought he deserved to win just because he had this year's saddest story. He's dead and Lyme's not sorry, and if his son grew up without a father then he was likely better off, since Lyme has never met a dad who wasn't a piece of shit. For all she knows, Six could've turned to the needle after his win like almost every other Victor in his district and left his family just as alone as if he'd bit it.

But the girl -- she didn't ask for this. She didn't ask for her body to take what that boy shoved inside her and turn it against her. Didn't ask to be made host to a greedy creature that kicked and sapped her energy and would grow into a thing that wailed and turned her into nothing but a caregiver for its every screaming whim. Didn't ask for all the interviews she would have been forced through once the tributes reached the Final Eight.

Didn't deserve to face a life filled with all of that and no Victor's stipend to at least make sure she had enough to eat.

No, Lyme still doesn't feel sorry for Six Male, or for the mentor who spun his sob story. What's done is done, and it's no more than what happens every year in every district and will long after all of them are dead. But the girl -- that's something else, and it twists deep in Lyme's gut and leaves her swallowing the sour taste of bile as the pressure in her throat rises and presses up against the underside of her jaw.

_Artemisia doesn't like boys at all, by the way, that should please you_ , Callista had said, and she'd meant it more along the lines of Lyme's Village-known hatred of men as a species in general, but it's more than that. Lyme will never, ever have to worry about any man doing that to her girl, and for that she's painfully glad.

It's too much, and finally Lyme cracks and pulls out her phone, hitting the first number on her speed dial. Her mentor's voice answers on the second ring, and Lyme lets out a long breath and pushes her free hand through her hair. "Six's girl killed herself," she says.

Nero sighs. "I'm sorry, little girl," he says, and the first time he called her that Lyme nearly slashed open his jugular, but now it acts like a balm on her frazzled nerves. She's twenty years old and has managed to feel both twice and half that age at the same time, and right now what she wants more than anything is to sit with her head on her mentor's shoulder and not be responsible for anything for an hour. "The baby?"

"Dead too, I'm guessing," Lyme says. She doesn't care about the baby. One less unwanted child in a district full of infants already addicted to the drug that will haunt them for the rest of their lives, not her problem. Her throat closes, and she squeezes her eyes tight. "I want to go home." 

"Soon," Nero promises. Another week of this, a few days of partying in the Capitol, and Artemisia will be back in Two with the people who love her, and Lyme can start trying to pick up the pieces -- again. "I'm thinking about you. You're doing something nobody's ever done before, pulling your girl so quick. You're doing a great job."

It doesn't feel like it; Nero always seemed one step ahead of things, whether it was Lyme's own attempts to test him or the demons that chased her, but here Lyme is doing nothing but playing catch-up, struggling to react after she's failed to keep Artemisia safe. She's bandaging the wounds instead of being able to block the strike in the first place, and every day on the train makes the helpless, left-behind feeling grow stronger. 

"Hey," Nero says, and he's never sharp with her but his voice does take a commanding edge, and Lyme sits up. "Whatever you're thinking, it's bullshit. You're doing everything you need to do. Whatever the districts do or say, that's not on you, all right? You're not responsible for making sure the shit-heads in the audience behave, that's not your job. Focus on your girl." 

"Yeah," Lyme says, and she can almost feel Nero's hand on her arm, solid and reassuring. "Thanks."

"I'll see you in the Capitol," Nero says. A handful of Victors come up for the final run of parties to support their Victor, and Lyme didn't debase herself asking for her mentor to be one of them but she's not surprised he insisted. She can't even get angry. "Chin up, girl, and get some rest." 

Lyme drags a blanket and pillow into Artemisia's room and lies down on the floor by the bed, too rattled for the hallway. When the escort returns in a tizzy following the change in schedule, Lyme turns the wall screen to a scene of the mountains in Two and tunes her out.

 

* * *

 

A week and a half later, Artemisia and Lyme return to the Village. 

The central and inner districts went better than the outlying ones, but even so, by the time they arrived at the Capitol for the penultimate stop, Artemisia's fatigue was showing. Lyme convinced the stylist not to hide the signs completely, leaving a hint of a shadow under the Victor's eyes and skipping the usual eye-brightening drops, despite the screeches from the prep team at allowing their charge to appear in public looking anything but perfect. The president wanted Artemisia humble, and seeing her camera-fresh and dewy would not have fulfilled that promise; she couldn't look haggard or she could be seen as ungrateful, but Lyme allowed for some of the polish to rub off.

Lyme suspects she'll never know whether they performed to the president's satisfaction, but none of the districts rioted against the Capitol during or after their visits like after the Quarter Quell, and nobody got called in for last-minute meetings with President Snow, so she counts that as a win. 

Artemisia entered the Village nearly six months ago with a swagger in her step and a cocky tilt to her head. She returns now after her Tour still unbowed, but wilted, just a little, and she turns to watch the gates close behind her and exhales when the locks finally click into place. "There," Lyme says. "You're home."

She doesn't move. She stands there in the front drive, boots half-buried in snow, and she's wearing a Capitol-issue soft wool coat that she'll throw in the closet like the rest of them because those clothes belong  _there_ not  _here_ . Finally Artemisia sniffles and rubs a hand under her nose; Lyme doesn't embarrass her by asking whether she's crying or the cold is making her nose run, since her girl's answer would likely be the same regardless.

"I never," Artemisia says, still staring at the gate, "want to do that again."

"You don't have to," Lyme reminds her, and after all the uneasy vows she's made this one, at least, she can promise and know it's real. "That's it, you did it." 

"They hate me out there." Artemisia lifts one boot and scuffs it in the snow, kicking over the top crust and throwing up a soft cloud of the powdery under-layer. "Hypocritical fuckers."

Lyme shrugs. "They hate all of us out there -- in the districts, I mean -- but they love us in Two, remember that. They're the ones we fight for."

Neither Lyme nor her girl were ever big into district pride, sacrifice for the sake of patriotism like Brutus and his ilk, but sometimes it's comforting. A lot of what the Centre promises its candidates is pure bullshit -- like the endless, worldwide respect and glory -- but they save the lives of two kids every year and provide emotional security for thousands of parents and children. That, at least, is true, and their district respects and honours them for it.

Artemisia has been staring at the gate for longer than Lyme is comfortable with, and finally Lyme knocks her girl on the shoulder before she can slip away and blank out completely. "C'mon," Lyme says. "You want to go throw snowballs at Brutus' windows and see how long he's mature about it before he comes out to yell at us?"

It's not her most subtle ploy by a long shot, and Artemisia shoots her a glance with a slanted half-smile that says she knows exactly what's going on, but Lyme holds her ground. Finally Artemisia cracks a small grin and tugs her gloves from her pocket. "Sure," she says, tugging at her gloves. "You take the front side, I'll go around the back." 

Brutus lasts six minutes. The next day he climbs up onto Lyme's roof to dump a whole mess of snow down her chimney at five in the morning, so that it's mostly melted onto her carpet by the time she makes it downstairs for breakfast. Lyme curses Brutus even as Artemisia cackles with helpless laughter, and the first Village prank war of the 57 th kicks off to a fine start.

"This is fun," Artemisia whispers as they sneak into Odin's house and move all the books on his shelf one spot to the left. She still withdraws into herself, and this morning over breakfast she complained about everything Lyme made from the edges of her fried eggs to the way Lyme poured the orange juice in an attempt to make her snap, but for now she's grinning, and as always that's how they have to take it -- day by day, sunrise to sunrise, and on the bad ones, hour by hour.

Lyme winks and hands her the first book on the next shelf down.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, Haymitch, really I am.
> 
> This chapter was supposed to be the last one, but then it exploded (story of my life) so we've got one more after this. A lot of issues got stirred up here that have to get smoothed out.
> 
> Also, NaNoWriMo has started, and instead of staying up until midnight to get a head start on that, I finished this chapter to tide you guys through in case I don't finish the next one until December. You're welcome. ;)


	6. Hit Me With Your Best Shot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“My old man, I knew exactly how far I could push him and when I had to stop. I bet it was the same with yours. But you, oh no, you’re all with the ‘everything is fine, let me hold your hand and clean up the mess’ bullshit and I don’t know where the fucking line is!”_
> 
> After the Tour there are a few more hurdles to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for mentions of past child abuse and the issues associated with that.

The Victory Tour is a two-week parade of hell for fresh Victors, coming off six months of medication and relaxation and throwing them back into the fray. For kids who just started to move past the horror, standing face to face with the blank-eyed families of the dead and the grieving, disapproving, or furious district citizens tears everything loose and jumbles it up again. Those who managed to escape the Arena guilt until that point find themselves stumbling at the finish line, and the ones who convinced themselves that honour above all made everything all right have to square that away with daily evidence that their existence brings misery to hundreds of thousands of people.

But the shine of good, pure metal appears when you clean away the blood; for Victors who distrust their mentor, or think they don’t need one, or any other reason that sullies the bond in the months previous, the Tour strips that all away. The districts are not on a Victor’s side, not ever; the Capitol citizens love the spectacle but not the human soul behind it, and the president is to be feared and obeyed and loved but remains apart. Through the fog and confusion and guilt, one person stands clear: the mentor, the one who can be relied on to understand a Victor’s every need, to see past the blood and gore and anger, to know every weakness and every ugly secret and never flinch.

After the Tour is when the most problematic of Victors realize that their mentor is an ally who will never, ever leave. After the Tour, no matter how bad the initial recovery, is when things get better.

At least, in theory.

Everyone told Lyme that in mentor training; Nero confirmed it, said that was when she managed to shed the last of her suspicions and stop acting out. Brutus had only argued with Odin once or twice in his entire recovery and therefore belonged on a pedestal with magical unicorn tributes, but as far as Lyme could find out from talking to the others, everyone else with a Victor of their own agreed.

Lyme always knew Artemisia was special; it only makes sense that she would buck this convention, too.

The Tour wreaked its havoc on Artemisia like anyone else, leaving her with a head stuffed full of confusion and betrayal and guilt, with a good helping of anger that she’d managed to fall prey to any of that. After they returned she’d been quiet for a few days, letting Lyme take care of her and make her food and set up a pile of blankets by the window. She’d picked up embroidery as her private talent after making cat clothes with Callista, and so Artemisia practiced her stitches and watched the birds flock to the feeder that Nero built and set up for her. For a little while Lyme thought it was working, that Artemisia finally trusted her after everything they went through together.

Lyme has two weeks, give or take, to enjoy this illusion before it breaks. One night, Artemisia asks for stir-fry for dinner. Lyme was never an amazing cook but she’s learning for her girl, and stir-fry at least isn’t difficult. Toss vegetables and meat in a pan, add sauce, and hey-presto, instant food; good for Victors who need to keep their strength and weight on and mentors who don’t have a lot of time to fiddle with complex recipes. Lyme gives Artemisia a knife sharp enough to cut through the softer vegetables but too blunt to hurt herself (her girl hasn’t shown any signs of wanting to, but no point in playing with fire), and they work and talk and Lyme shoves down the urge to pump her fist in the air.

The other day Emory had shown Lyme how to thicken sauce with cornstarch (“You don’t need to use butter or eggs like you do if you use flour,” she said. “I know we have whatever we want now, but in the quarries that’s a hell of a waste.”), and as it turns out, yet again her folk wisdom actually holds true. The first time Lyme tried to make stir-fry the sauce managed to be weak and lumpy at the same time, but today it’s just right. Maybe she can learn to cook and maybe she can get a handle on this mentor thing and maybe things will be all right after all.

It’s fine until they eat. Artemisia takes one bite, drops her fork onto her plate, and shoves the whole thing away. “I don’t want it.”

Patience, Nero told her. Victors look for a reaction, and you have to learn to give the right kind. Lyme sure pushed Nero as far as she could, back during her recovery, searching for the edge and how far it would be until she shoved him over.

Lyme raises an eyebrow and takes another bite. “You sure? It’s good. And it’s Emory’s recipe.”

Invoking the name of the woman Artemisia still sort of has a crush on usually works, but today Artemisia only scowls. “I don’t want it anymore, I want something else.”

Lyme’s memories of her childhood are fuzzy by design, but her mind clutches at an image of a kitchen table just too high for her, a plate of something undercooked and overcooked at once and a man’s voice shouting “You’ll eat what your mother gives you to eat or you won’t eat at all!” She grips her fork tightly enough that an ache spasms through her fingers, but Artemisia has her eyes fixed on Lyme’s face, prying for weakness, and so Lyme only nods.

“Sure,” she says. “There’s bread in the fridge and fixings for all kinds of sandwiches. I can make you one if you tell me what you want, or you can do it yourself if you’d rather.”

Artemisia exhales hard through her nose, and yeah, that’s reaction-seeking sure enough. Lyme would say she’d never been that bad, but she isn’t that good at self-deception. “I want to go out.”

Lyme’s first instinct is to say yes just to show Artemisia that she’s not a spoilsport, but that’s what the training is for. Boundaries are just as important as freedom, they told her; if a Victor thinks they can get away with anything they’ll stop feeling safe and protected and start feeling anxious, even if they don’t know why.

“Tomorrow afternoon we can look at restaurants and see where you feel like going,” Lyme says easily. “If you don’t feel like stir-fry anymore I can make you a sandwich or heat up the leftover pasta from yesterday. Which would you like?”

She’ll never pull off the beatific, intentionally oblivious smile that Nero used to pull on her when she acted out, but that’s not Lyme’s deal. Artemisia stares at her for a long moment, fingers drumming against the tabletop, but then she sighs and picks up her fork. “Never mind,” she says, her tone peeved, and shoves her mouth so full it takes her three swallows to finish the bite.

Lyme doesn’t say a word.

A few days later Artemisia breaks the code of providing two options to give an illusion of choice. Lyme figured it out herself soon enough, back in the day, and she’d been a mix of irritated and grudgingly impressed. Artemisia, for her part, fights back. If Lyme asks if she wants to go for a walk or spar, Artemisia chooses watching TV; if Lyme offers pasta or soup for lunch, Artemisia wants lasagna. It’s typical, and the training warned Lyme it would happen, except that timeline-wise it’s all off. These are baby games, played by Victors in their first three, maybe four months of recovery. They should be past this by the Tour.

Lyme reacts as she’s been taught, calmly and without judgement, and every time Artemisia fails to provoke her mentor she only boils hotter. There’s nothing Lyme can do but wait it out, but every night she goes to bed and stares at the ceiling, wondering what she’s done wrong.

Only shitty mentors blame their Victor, Nero told her. If a Victor loses it and sets the house on fire, it’s on the mentor to have seen it coming, to be there to take the matches away.

One night Lyme misses the extra knife at the table right before Artemisia comes at her with it. In the split second it takes her girl to reach her, Lyme flashes through half a dozen options — let her fight it out; knock her down; dodge out of the way — but settles for twisting the knife away and pinning Artemisia against the wall. Her Victor snarls and struggles and flings insults at her like she’s back on the first day of drug withdrawal, but Lyme takes all the hits and lets them roll off, even if they stick on their way down.

“Okay,” Lyme says once Artemisia runs out of ways to insult Lyme’s parentage and sexual prospects. “You don’t actually want to kill me or you would’ve tried me while I was sleeping, so. What is this?”

“Nothing,” Artemisia snaps. “Nothing’s wrong, nothing is ever wrong, just pat me on the head and let me go back to dinner, right?”

Lyme would be extremely shocked to hear she’d ever patted anyone on the head in her life — other than Brutus, when they both shotgunned a beer at the annual spring Village barbecue and he choked on his — but that isn’t the point. She takes a second to process (thinking time is never bad unless the question is ‘do you love me’ or ‘will you leave me’, Nero told her, where the answer should be automatic and instinctive) and leaves her arm firm across Artemisia’s chest.

“If I were going to be killed with a dinner knife I wouldn’t be here,” Lyme says finally. “But I can demote you to plastic utensils if that’s what you want from me.”

Mistake. Never ask a Victor what she wants, because young Victors either have a thousand contradictory ideas or none at all and either way the panic works out the same. No matter how much Artemisia (and Lyme, in her day, and likely Callista before them) might chafe at the restrictions and carefully-offered choices, it’s better than letting her muddle through everything by herself.

Sure enough, Artemisia’s expression darkens. The angrier she gets the younger she looks, funny enough, eyebrows pulling together and mouth turned down in an insubordinate expression that must have frustrated the hell out of her trainers. It matches one of the photos in her file, back in her early days at the Centre, when she’d refused to smile or pose and sat slumped in the chair with her whole face screwed up into the definition of sullenness.

She’d sported a bruise on her cheek, then, starting on the outside edge of her face and spreading inward — the kind that came from a backhand slap, not an honest punch to the face. Lyme recognized both the injury and the expression that came from it, and now —

(Artemisia on the roof last fall, giving Lyme a stare both evaluating and lazy at the same time. _I don't mean what are you gonna give me, I mean what am I gonna_ get _?_ )

“Artemisia,” Lyme says slowly, “I’m not going to hit you.” This time the knife hits the target; the lines around Artemisia’s eyes go tight, and her mouth thins. “I mean it. Whatever you do, however far you push me, I won’t ever hit you. Not ever.”

“I know.” Artemisia’s eyes flick to the sides, wildly, like a trapped animal’s. “I can do whatever I want, right? I can fucking try to _stab_ you and you won’t stop me.”

“I did stop you,” Lyme points out, pressing hard with her arm so Artemisia will feel the pressure against her throat. “And I will. But not like that.”

Artemisia sags, going deadweight, and Lyme knows what a feint looks like, that when she moves to counterbalance Artemisia will strike and try to knock her down. Instead Lyme backs off, leaving nothing but her hand just below her girl’s shoulder. “Upstairs,” Lyme says. “There’s more room.”

There’s an empty room on the second floor that could be converted to a spare bedroom in case Artemisia has a Victor of her own one day who might want to spend the night, and Artemisia pulls away and stalks up the steps.

Right from the start, it’s not going to be a good fight. Even on their messiest days Artemisia always fought her for real, trying to get under Lyme’s guard or cause her to overbalance or find her weak spots. Today she’s not holding back — her fist hits Lyme’s ribs hard enough to bruise — but when it’s time to dodge or duck or block Lyme’s returns, there she drops her guard. Not obviously, not entirely, but after a decade of learning the language of fights, Lyme catches the shift a split second before her blows connect and has to yank it back.

Artemisia is angling for a beating, and if Lyme won’t give it to her then she’ll do her best to make it happen herself.

For a second Lyme almost knocks her down and pins her again — but no. It didn’t work before and it won’t work now, and so all she can do is stay on her edge and pull back at the last second instead of landing a hit. It doesn’t take long for Artemisia to catch on, and after doing her best and failing to provoke Lyme for the umpteenth time, finally she flings herself back out of range.

“Why won’t you just do it?” Artemisia demands, breathing hard, voice gone ragged with the edge of hysteria. She pushes a hand into her hair and yanks at the brown strands, then starts a round of frantic pacing. “How am I supposed to get better if I’m scared all the damn time?”

Lyme stops dead. The mentor handbook didn’t have a page on this one. “You’re scared — because I _won’t_ hit you?”

“Fucking duh,” Artemisia snaps. “My old man, I knew exactly how far I could push him and when I had to stop. I bet it was the same with yours. But you, oh no, you’re all with the ‘everything is fine, let me hold your hand and clean up the mess’ bullshit and I don’t know where the fucking line is!”

Always set limits, they told her, or Victors will feel unsafe. For Lyme that had been Nero saying ‘no’, taking away the knife and putting bandages on her wrists and checking her arms for new cuts. Even that had been enough to drive her half insane until she snapped at him, but she’d respected that in a way she never had her father’s fists.

If Artemisia only ever learned boundaries enforced with violence —

This time Lyme does knock her down, holds her shoulders hard against the floor and settles all her weight so even if Artemisia flings herself sideways or tries to bring her legs up it won’t throw Lyme off. “This is the limit,” she says, stressing the words. “When I hold you down, that’s what this means. It means I’m telling you to stop, and it means I’m not going anywhere. You got it?”

“Bullshit,” Artemisia says again, eyes wide. “Bullshit! Everybody hits.”

“No.” Lyme leans her weight down. “Shitty people hit. _Everybody_ doesn’t.” The sparring is supposed to speak for itself, that’s how it’s meant to work — it’s a way for the Victor to understand the mentor without words, without explanations. Nero fought Lyme again and again and again until it clicked for her that he wasn’t leaving no matter how much she pushed him away, that she wasn’t an experiment or a curiosity or a temporary diversion. But maybe Lyme’s not old enough, maybe by the time she’s been out a decade or more she’ll have it down, but for now —

“If you try to kill me, I’ll stop you and then I’ll hold you down,” Lyme says. “If you try again when I let you up then I’ll hold you down again, and we’ll keep going until you get bored or fall asleep or you finally get that there’s nothing you can do that will make me hurt you.”

“Yeah, because you don’t give a shit,” Artemisia snarls, and suddenly she’s clawing and snapping and Lyme nearly loses her balance wondering where it came from until the light glistens off the moisture in Artemisia’s eyes. “You don’t care, if you did you’d hit me! How am I supposed to count on you, huh, if you won’t even show me who’s boss?”

It’s all Lyme can do not to demand Artemisia tell her what her father’s name is so Lyme can track him down and rip off his fingers. “I’m the boss because I’m telling you I’m the boss,” Lyme says, and no she isn’t, she’s twenty years old, over her head and terrified, but she puts on her best Victor face and holds her girl steady. “I’m the boss because you might be the best with swords but I can knock you on your ass any day of the week. I’m the boss because I’m your mentor and that means I went through hell for you. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat, I drank coffee so thick I had to chew it. I memorized idiot fluffy women’s taste in poodles so I could compliment them and get you that water bottle. I did a hell of a lot more than stick my dick in your mother and shoot off a load without a condom, and _that_ means I’m the boss. And if after all that you still think the only way I can prove it is to belt you one, then we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Artemisia stares at her, then, incongruously, lets out a burst of startled laughter. “I think you just insulted my mother there, mentor.”

“Just her taste,” Lyme says easily. “Though more, if she did the same.”

“Nah.” Artemisia closes her eyes, and they’ve gone off track but it doesn’t matter. “She’d just watch. Maybe sigh a bit, real disappointed through her teeth.”

“I’m not disappointed,” Lyme says. “You’re perfect.”

Artemisia raises her eyebrows. “Perfectly crazy, maybe.”

“No, just perfect.” Lyme digs her fingers hard into Artemisia’s shoulders. “I like you crazy, I wouldn’t have chosen you if you weren’t. And I sure as hell care about you more than those fucksticks ever did. I’ll keep knocking you down until you believe me.”

Artemisia falls quiet, then her entire body deflates and she sags back against the floor. “Whatever you say, boss.”

“Good girl.” Lyme rolls off, waits for Artemisia to sit up, then takes the plunge and pulls her in for a hug. Artemisia goes stiff and still like Lyme just stabbed a knife in her spine, but Lyme holds on until finally the hard line of her back loosens and her head drops onto Lyme’s shoulder. She doesn’t hug back, but her fingers toy with the bottom hem of Lyme’s sweater and her breath hitches and good enough.

Lyme doesn’t soften the hug, doesn’t rub Artemisia’s back or pet her hair, just stays there, solid and steady until Artemisia’s heart stops hammering against her chest. Finally Lyme pulls back, ignoring the telltale sheen in her girl’s eyes and flicking her in the forehead instead. “You want to go build a snow fort out in Brutus’ yard, then pelt him with snowballs when he comes outside?”

“Are we going to go make Brutus’ life miserable every time I have an emotional crisis?” Artemisia asks, her mouth twitching.

“There are worse traditions,” Lyme says.

Artemisia laughs, but then she runs a hand over her face. “It sounds fun, but — could we just stay in? It’s getting late and I’m tired.”

“Sure,” Lyme says. “I’ll get blankets, we’ll set up on the couch.”

Artemisia studies her face, eyes narrowing a fraction, and Lyme readies herself for a test. “Can I paint your nails?”

One of the last things Lyme ever wants to do is put chemicals on her skin, especially ones that the Capitol stylists fought Nero over until he argued them down to a clear polish. But when her Victor asks… “Sure,” Lyme says. “Anything but pink. My stylist says I don’t have the colouring to pull that off.” To put it mildly.

Artemisia shakes her head. “Nah, you look like a blue to me,” she says, and her expression brightens. “I don’t have any, but I bet Callista would let me borrow some.”

“I don’t think Callista has anything but silver or blood red,” Lyme says dryly. “But I can make a call and have someone deliver it.”

Artemisia laughs again, this time startled and joyous. “Man, there’s the reason I won the Hunger Games, nail polish delivery to my door in the middle of winter.”

“Is that a no?” Lyme cocks an eyebrow at her.

“Didn’t say it was a no.” Artemisia grins.

There’s still an edge of wariness in her posture, and she keeps flicking her gaze over Lyme’s face, checking for a reaction, but it’s better than it was an hour ago and for now, Lyme will take it.

“Let me get my phone,” Lyme says. “You get the blankets.”

 

* * *

 

 

Lyme stays on the couch until morning, afraid that if she moves the spell will break. After painting their nails an alarming shade of blue, Artemisia had rolled a blanket around her shoulders like a human-sized cannoli and flopped down on the sofa with her head in Lyme’s lap. Lyme froze until her fingernails no longer felt tacky and then slowly, slowly, ran her hands through the girl’s hair.

It’s the most honest affection she’s shown that Lyme can remember without having been pumped full of mood stabilizers or jangled from a nightmare, and in case this is a dream or a hallucination from the acetone vapours she sits still all through the night.

Come morning Artemisia crawls awake with a groan and stretch like the entire existence of any time between dawn and noon offends her. Lyme blinks rapidly to bring herself back, and she’s there with a reassuring hand on the girl’s shoulder when Artemisia starts at the strange position and sits halfway up. “Oh, right,” Artemisia says, yawning and lying back down. “Did you stay there all night?”

“You had a rough day,” Lyme tells her, and somewhere in the distant part of her memory she’d promised herself and Nero that she would be a professional mentor, not one of the ones bogged down in messy feelings. So much for that. “I thought I should let you sleep.”

“Sap,” Artemisia says, sounding inordinately pleased, and Lyme gapes down at her. “What, nobody ever called you that before?”

“No,” Lyme says, poking her Victor between the eyes. Artemisia scowls, but judging from the exaggerated expression it’s an attempt to trap Lyme’s finger in the frown lines than actual annoyance. “Do you want breakfast?”

Artemisia considers, partially unfolding the blanket, then making a face and curling back up. “No, it’s cold. I’ll eat if you make me something but I don’t want to move.”

Lyme raises both eyebrows, but it’s all she can do not to kiss the stars that they managed a breakthrough and so she gives up. “If I get up to make you breakfast, you don’t get to complain about how the eggs are cooked,” she says. “That’s the deal.”

“A hard bargain, but at least I don’t have to kill somebody to get an apple,” Artemisia says. “Wait, that was Brutus. What did I get?”

“Pears,” Lyme says immediately, and now she would really rather stay on the couch and never leave or let Artemisia out of her sight again, but instead she eases herself up. Artemisia makes a noise of protest at being jostled but accepts a cushion as a lap alternative, and Lyme tousles her hair on the way to the kitchen.

 

* * *

 

 

One afternoon Artemisia drags her outside to make a snowman. Lyme never liked snow; her second kill test happened in the winter, and she’d stared at the red splashes across the spread of white as the hot blood melted tiny divots in the frozen surface. In her Arena, a savannah baked by the Gamemakers’ artificial sun during the day, the temperatures plunged below freezing as soon as the nightly anthem played.

But her girl wants a snowman and a snowman she will have, and so Lyme pulls on her jacket and gloves and mostly stands watch as Artemisia rolls the snow into giant balls and heaves them up on top of each other. “Too bad logs wouldn’t stay,” Artemisia says, poking at the sticks she’s jammed into the sides. “You have such beefy arms. Snow-Lyme doesn’t do you justice.”

“Snow-me, huh,” Lyme says, staring at the mostly-shapeless hunk of ice. “You gonna make a you, then?”

“I’m gonna make the Village,” Artemisia announces grandly and likely over-optimistically, and Lyme says absolutely nothing.

Predictably, while Artemisia manages to build a tall, skinny snowman to represent herself, she tires halfway through snow-Nero. He’s a hulking beast twice the size of snow-Lyme, and after making him half the white cover in the yard is gone, dried grey-green grass poking through the long, bare tracks where the snowballs rolled. “This would be easier if we were an outer district,” Artemisia says, packing snow around Nero’s neck so his head won’t fall off and then leaving him featureless. “There’s too many, and everyone is huge. I’m like the littlest Victor over here.”

Artemisia stands nearly six feet tall and is leggy like Callista, but that still puts her nearly half a foot shorter than her mentor. Lyme laughs as Artemisia pokes experimentally at her bicep through the thick wool sleeve of her jacket. “We like you little,” Lyme says. “Let’s take a break and then give poor snow-Nero a face or the real one will sigh at us next time he comes over.”

She’d brought out cocoa in a pair of thermoses, and they sit on the porch and drink, the steam rising up in a cloud around their faces. Artemisia leans against Lyme’s shoulder just a little and surveys her handiwork.

“What do they do with the ones who die?” she asks out of nowhere, and Lyme steels herself just in time to avoid flinching.

Breathe, Lyme reminds herself. She curls her fingers around the thermos and lets the warmth permeate through to her fingers. “They’re buried in the field of sacrifice. The Centre bought the land and pays for the upkeep.”

Artemisia leans back to stare at her. “We do not seriously have a field of sacrifice. I thought that was a joke.”

“No, we really do,” Lyme says. “I’ve never been there. It’s bad luck to go before — before you have to.”

Callista would’ve gone there last summer with Jasper. Brutus put his first girl in the ground the year before that. Brutus chose black eyed susans as his memorial flower; Lyme never asked about Callista’s, but she guesses it’s something red and unapologetic. Odds are, the next kid Lyme takes after Artemisia will end up there, too. She shudders, sets the thermos down and wraps her arm around her girl’s shoulders. “Why did you want to know?”

Artemisia shrugs, staring down at her cocoa. “I dunno, just curious I guess. What do you think they do with them in the other districts?”

“Give them back to the families, probably,” Lyme says, warning bells ringing in her mind, but they can’t hide from death forever and it’s better Artemisia talk about it than have it bubble to the surface on its own later. “I’ve never really thought much about the traditions elsewhere.”

“They probably burned what’s his name, from Six,” Artemisia says. “I saw that shitty district, nowhere to bury anybody. I bet they burn people and just let the ashes go wherever and people are always breathing in the dead but they can’t tell because the air is full of shitty, shitty smog.” Her voice goes tight, and Lyme stays very still and says nothing. “They didn’t even have snow, did you see? Just grey slush mixed in with all that city dirt. What a shithole.”

Artemisia sniffles loudly, wetly, and turns her face into Lyme’s shoulder. “I hate Six. Nobody cares when you’re born and nobody cares when you die and you just get mixed up in the same shit you breathe your whole life. What’s the _point_ of that?”

She hasn’t talked about Six since her Tour when she refused to apologize, and Lyme hasn’t touched it. Guilt and grief hits in its own way, and now Artemisia sucks in a hard breath and scrubs a hand over her face. “I’m not sorry,” she says, her voice thick, and Lyme doesn’t argue. “I’m just sad for that shitpile of a district. It’s just so stupid and pointless and terrible, I don’t know why anyone gets out of bed. I’m glad I live here.”

“Me too,” Lyme says, and she holds her girl as she cries. Finally she peels off her gloves to wipe away the moisture from Artemisia’s cheeks without scraping her with the frozen fabric. Artemisia lets out a long breath, then pulls away.

“Okay, let’s give Nero a face,” she says, and Lyme claps her on the back.

 

* * *

 

 

Artemisia doesn't complain about the food, the temperature of the house, or anything else for upward of two weeks. When the weather isn't blowing icy pellets in their faces from the wind Lyme takes her out for walks, and they go the perimeter of the fence and up a short way through the trails out to the frozen lake. Artemisia scoots forward on her stomach to stare at the frozen plants suspended below the surface, and Lyme curls her hands into fists in her pockets to stop herself from darting forward to make sure her girl doesn't go through the ice and into the water.

(It's stupid. They've all been flung into a frozen lake before, and it's not like the pond behind the Village has a current that would drag her under. Afterward Artemisia runs back to the bank with pink cheeks and a wide grin, and see, it's fine. Mentorship does something very, very strange to the brain.)

Then, one afternoon, Lyme suggests they take the trail a little further up to the first level of cliffs. "It's pretty in the winter," she says. "The sky's clear, and you can see the frozen river going out through the centre of the district."

"No," Artemisia says.

Lyme blinks. It's the same mulish tone from the early stages but mixed with deliberation, and Artemisia darts her eyes toward Lyme as though to make sure she caught the insubordination. "All right," Lyme says instead. No sense picking a fight over something that small. "We could go into town and look at the shops instead."

"No," she says again, curling her fingers and examining the chipped polish on her nails.

This time Lyme lets her eyebrows creep up. "No? Do you want to stay in and embroider me something?” The 'no' this time comes as predicted, and Lyme taps Artemisia's shoulder. "Up, let's go, we're sparring."

It's a quick fight; Artemisia puts up a bit of an effort, but soon enough Lyme shoves her up against the wall and gets her hands pinned above her head. There's no wildness in Artemisia's eyes this time, and the stubborn light dies and her shoulders drop. "You good?" Lyme asks, and Artemisia nods. "Tell me what you want to do."

"It's cold," Artemisia says, flexing her hands but not struggling to break free. "Can we stay in?"

"Sure," Lyme says, stepping back, and she's pretty sure she offered that option but she isn't going to point that out. Sometimes things go squirrelly in a kid's head and they need a match to set things straight, that's all. "You pick the channel, I'll make popcorn."

It happens again the next day, and again two days after that. The time after that it's twice in one day, and each time Artemisia picks a fight for no reason Lyme can figure out, only to agree with a spurned suggestion or eat the food she'd refused earlier once the sparring bout finishes. It's newbie behaviour, like the boundary testing all over again, and when Artemisia has gone to bed for the night Lyme sits with her notes from the training sessions trying to figure out what has gone wrong. Victors don't push unless they feel unsafe and need reassurance, but as far as Lyme can track down, nothing changed between last week and this one.

She could call Nero. She probably should, that would be the quick and responsible thing to do, but the idea of calling her mentor and asking for advice instead of figuring it out herself --

The next time Artemisia announces that all her clothes are ugly and she refuses to wear any of them. After a long round of sparring that ends with her on the floor, Lyme's elbow at her throat and one foot pinning her hand to the ground, Artemisia consents to borrow one of Lyme's sweaters.

The sight of Artemisia swimming in her mentor's sweater triggers a memory in the back of Lyme's mind. She'd had a bad time of it when Nero started going to the Capitol to fuck his horde of cougar sponsors, and once to cheer her up he'd left her a shirt to wear. Lyme told him she didn't need it, but once his truck left the Village gates she'd hauled it on over her clothes and curled up in the corner of the couch, knees tucked up under the bottom edge.

Lyme drops down next to Artemisia, and sure enough her girl tips sideways against her side. "Hey," Lyme says slowly, because if she's wrong then this could blow the whole thing to the Arena and back. "You know if you want to spar you could just ask. You don't have to act out like that."

Artemisia stops humming, and the line of her arm goes tense. "I don't --"

"I like sparring," Lyme says, cutting off the flustered denial before it takes root. "It's fun. There's no reason why we can't just spar for the hell of it. If you want to, just say something."

Artemisia tugs one of the sleeves down over her hands, plucking a loose thread at the end. "It -- I don't want to," she says, and Lyme waits because she trails off instead of ending it. "I mean, I don't want to ask. It feels stupid, or babyish or something. You and Nero don’t.”

Lyme could go the Adessa route, find out statistics of how many Victors continue sparring with their mentors. She and Nero don't, true, but it's more because his size makes it awkward for them to have fun with it and she doesn't want to whale on him full out the way she does Brutus. Brutus and Odin still have matches at least once a week, and Emory talks about sparring with Brutus with such open honesty that she likely wouldn’t understand why anyone else might be embarrassed. The numbers are there, but Lyme looks down at the top of her girl's head and she thinks, no. No, logic and statistics wouldn't have worked with her, and she's betting it won't for Artemisia either.

"What about a code?" Lyme says.

Artemisia tilts her head back and squints up at her. "What kind of code?"

"A way to tell me you want to spar, but we don't have to say it. And if anyone else is around they won't know what it means."

Artemisia lets out a breath and stretches, pushing her feet against the side of the coffee table. "That... could be good," she says, and Lyme gives herself a mental high-five. "I'm not -- I didn't think, I don't know. I hated it when my mom tried to cuddle me, and she did it all the time. She'd try to pull me into her lap and I started hiding pencils in my pockets so I could stab her and make her let me go. My old man belted me for it but I'd rather get hit in the face than hugged when I didn't feel like it.” She reaches over and takes Lyme's hand, lacing their fingers and twisting them this way and that to examine the last of the matching polish on their nails. “But I feel like it more with you. Is that weird?"

Careful, careful. Lyme taps her foot against the floor, but in the end she takes the jump. "I used to sit in Nero's lap."

"You did not!"

"I did, when I was upset." The day Lyme found out what Nero did to earn her sponsor money, she'd crawled on top of him and refused to move until he had to carry her to the kitchen for dinner. "Sometimes I'd fall asleep on him while he was working and I watched TV, or whatever. Last spring when I was getting ready for you I passed out on him going over your files." Artemisia laughs, but it's light and incredulous, not mocking, and Lyme tugs the ends of her hair. "My point is, there's no magic age when you're suddenly too old for sparring or whatever else. If you want to keep going then we can keep going. I don't mind."

Artemisia ducks her head. "Really? I mean, I like it when my head's screwed on funny, too, you were right. It's much better than getting smacked. But I think I'd like it when I don't need it, either."

"Yeah," Lyme says, a warm glow in the centre of her chest threatening to spread out through her body and make her say stupid, soppy things. "It's nice."

"I'll think of a code," Artemisia says, sounding pleased. "I like that. In the Centre a few of the girls and I had one for sex." Lyme chokes, and Artemisia grins at her. “Don’t worry, that’s weird. I just wanted to see your face."

"Yeah, well, now I think you need a bit of a reminder who your mentor is," Lyme says, standing up and tugging her girl up after her. Artemisia gives her an impish smile, and Lyme snorts and shoves her into the wall.

A few days later, Artemisia hands Lyme a small square of fabric, sort of like a handkerchief but made of something thicker and heavier than the classy white things Adessa keeps on her. “What’s this?” Lyme asks.

“Look,” Artemisia says, bouncing a bit on her heels, and she clasps her hands behind her back. “Seriously, it’s right there.”

It’s a mess of knots and sticking-out ends and long stitches stretching across blank spaces, and Lyme blinks at it for a long moment before looking up. Artemisia rolls her eyes. “That’s the back side. I haven’t learned how to make the underside look nice yet, it’s hard. Turn it over.”

Lyme does, and this time she laughs. It’s a house with two little stitched people in front of it, one with long hair and one with short, and underneath Artemisia has picked out the phrase ‘Kick my ass, why don’t you’ in red thread. “I like that,” she says. “It’s subtle.”

Artemisia taps the side of her nose with a knowing expression, then laughs. “So what do you think?”

“I think I feel like sparring,” Lyme says, handing it back, and Artemisia grins and pockets it.

After that, Lyme finds that or other pieces of embroidery stuffed behind couch cushions, into her pockets, or waiting on the table under her plate. Whenever it happens Lyme finishes what they’re doing, then drags Artemisia up to the nearest clear space for a play-match. Afterward Artemisia takes back the fabric square to pull out the stitches and try a different design without having a hundred of scraps lying around the room, and Lyme ruffles her hair and gives her a hug.

Once Artemisia hides a pocket square in the toe of Lyme’s boot, and when she pulls it out and unwrinkles it Lyme nearly has a coronary to see ‘BEST MENTOR’ stitched in navy across the front without any ironic embellishments. It’s a nice fabric, plain blue linen, and Artemisia has learned to sew so that the back no longer makes a mess. It would go well with the charcoal suits Lyme wears out on business, and so this one Lyme doesn’t give back, just squirrels away in her drawer. Much later she wonders whether that wasn’t the point after all.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s spring when Artemisia tells Lyme she wants to have a campfire.

By now, at least, Lyme is used to her Victor’s more esoteric requests. “It’s a bit chilly out there today,” she says, pushing the curtain aside and checking the thermometer outside the window. “Not near freezing, and we’re past the snow, but you’re still going to get cold pretty quickly.”

“That’s what the campfire is for,” Artemisia says in an exaggeratedly patient tone. “Fire, hot. Heat, good. And like you said, it’s not freezing outside and we’ve both been in worse. I feel like a campfire, and sticking a marshmallow on a cooking skewer and holding it over the gas range isn’t going to cut it.”

“No, let’s not with the fire in the house,” Lyme says dryly. One of the notes in Artemisia’s early files mentioned a tendency toward pyromania, and while the Centre had given her weapons to play with instead and the interest waned, Lyme would rather not risk reactivating an old love. “You really want a campfire now?”

Artemisia shrugs. “Yeah. I don’t want to wait until summer, and anyway it would just feel like the Arena if it was warm out.” She’s stitching again, a pretty garden scene with the words ‘Fuck you and your face’ sewn in looping pink cursive, but when she pulls the thread tight the fabric puckers unevenly under the pressure and she scowls.

Lyme reaches over and takes it away, setting the needle and cloth on the table. “Get your coat,” she says. “Nobody’s going to die, but if either of us catch cold we’ll get made fun of until we wish we had.”

And so they end up outside in front of a small but crackling fire, clumps of chilly dirt and grass digging into their legs. Artemisia holds her hands out close to the flames to warm them, watching with an expression of quiet satisfaction that was miles away from her twisted Arena glee. It’s not that cold, really, and Lyme tosses in another branch to see the fire turn the bark black.

“So, mentor,” Artemisia says, pushing her hair back out of her face. “Was this one of the perks to having a Victor they mentioned to you in training?”

Lyme snorts, leans over and wraps her arms around Artemisia’s shoulders. “You be quiet, you’re perfect.” She actually kisses her girl’s hair, and Lyme did not give herself permission to do that but too late now. Artemisia doesn’t pull away, at any rate, so Lyme opts to let it go. “And no, I consider it a bonus.”

Artemisia knocks her head against Lyme’s. After a minute of quiet she says, “What were you going to be if you didn’t make Volunteer?”

That, at least, is an easy answer just because there isn’t one. “I didn’t have a backup plan,” Lyme says. “It was the Arena or nothing. I guess if I’d washed out I would’ve figure something out, but I didn’t want to think about it.”

“Me neither.” Artemisia leans forward and picks up a stick, poking it at the edge of the fire. “I was just thinking. Emory, I could see her as a Peacekeeper, one of the ones who stays in Two and takes care of the quarry towns. I bet if she’d come second that’s what she would’ve done. Brutus too, or maybe they’d both go back home and take up mining. Adessa could’ve gotten a job working with the district mayor or something. Me, though.” The end of the stick snaps against the ground, and she tosses it into the middle of the blaze. “It was this or the other side.”

Lyme frowns. “What do you mean, the other side?”

Artemisia stares into the fire, the light dancing across her face. “I used to steal things and break into houses and set shit on fire. One time the Peacekeeper who dragged me home told me I’d better do well at the Centre because if I didn’t, she bet I’d be staring at a kill test from from the opposite end of the sword.”

Nero said a similar thing once, that after he killed his stepfather they’d told him his choices were Residential or breaking rocks at one of the youth penitentiary mines. Lyme herself had wondered, once or twice, what she’d have done with all her seething, roiling anger if she hadn’t had the kill tests and the vicious, violent sparring matches in training to expel it. Maybe she would’ve stuck a knife in her old man’s jugular one night; maybe she would’ve mixed the rat poison he used to leave around his shop into his beer and wait for him to drink it. She’d thought about that and a dozen other ways to make it end, and only knowing that Residential waited for her if she sat on her hands and took his shit for another year had kept her from doing it.

“You’re not the only one,” Lyme says finally, and Artemisia’s glance flickers back at her before a tiny smile twitches at the corner of her mouth. “Look, it’s not like the Centre picks sweet kids and turns us into monsters, all of us had a killer underneath somewhere.”

“Except maybe Emory,” Artemisia says wryly.

Lyme stifles a laugh in an attempt to be mature. “Except maybe Emory,” she agrees. She’s never asked the older Victor what her life was like before the Centre, but Lyme can’t see her running around bashing heads. “Some of us might’ve been trained into it more than others, but there’s no shame in being born for this.”

“I blame my mother,” Artemisia drawls, and she usually brings up her father but this is twice now for her mother, and neither time happy. Lyme stills. “Not like that, I meant my name. The only people called Artemisia are Victors and socialites, and I sure as the Reaping wasn’t going to be a socialite.”

“Did they call you that when you were a kid, even?” Lyme asks. It’s dangerous territory, wading into the pool of childhood memories, but she’s here and the fire is warm and grounds them in the present. Once she’d asked Callista if her parents had ever called her ‘Calli’ like Nero does and the woman skewered her right through with a horrified gaze. Her parents, apparently, believed children had _dignity_. “I can’t imagine calling a little girl a name longer than she is.”

“Oh, sure.” Artemisia laughs, flat and fatalistic and dusted in bitterness, and Lyme still catches herself sounding like that when she lets herself remember the people who raised her. “My mother sighed it all disappointed, like, Arte- _mi_ -sia, any time I broke something or came home bloody or set the neighbour’s garden on fire. She wanted a perfect little princess and she got a perfect little muttation in hair ribbons. Meanwhile my old man would shout it through the house until it shook the walls. I swear when he said it he gave it six syllables, still can’t figure out how.”

“Well it is a good Victor’s name,” Lyme tells her, and Artemisia smiles at her, sharp and bright. The beginning of a thought starts working its way into her head. “But not much for after. ‘Artemisia’ doesn’t sound like the girl who paints my nails and demands cuddles.”

Artemisia snickers. “Well, if you come up with anything better let me know, because I get the feeling you’re good at that.”

Lyme tilts her head. “How so?”

“You really want me to believe some parents went and named their baby girl _Lyme_?” Artemisia raises her eyebrows in a fair imitation of Emory’s polite but incredulous expression. “You changed it when you signed the papers, I know you did. What was it before?”

Her birth name, soft and feminine and giving birth to a dozen cutesy nicknames, starts a treacherous whisper in Lyme’s ear before she stomps it down. “Never mind,” Lyme says, sharper than she intended. “That girl is dead.”

She curses herself for losing her temper over something so stupid — so personal, so _weak_ — but Artemisia, to her surprise, only nods. “My bad,” she says. “You told me we don’t ask other district Victors about their Games. I probably shouldn’t ask Twos about before the Arena unless they bring it up, right?”

Lyme unclenches her hands, slowly, and her fingers twitch to pull her sleeves down over the fading scars on her wrists but she keeps herself steady. “Probably better,” she agrees. “Everybody deserves a few secrets.”

“Fair enough,” Artemisia says, and she shifts in closer, warm against Lyme’s side.

The next morning Lyme wakes up early, and rather than stare at the ceiling she pulls on her jacket and boots and takes a walk down to the city centre. The temperature runs a few degrees warmer down at the base of the mountain, and by the time she gets there Lyme has shed her coat and tucked it under one arm.

The early vendors are setting up on the sides of main street, and the quiet bustle is soothing in a chaotic sort of way. Lyme wanders the road, picks up some fresh bread and a basket of muffins from the bakery, and she’s about to turn back and head up when the sharp, sweet scent of fresh produce hits her. Lyme stops by the seller’s stand and picks up a soft, yellow-pink fruit. “Is this a peach?” she asks, surprised. “I didn’t think they were in season.”

“No ma’am, that’s an apricot,” says the man pleasantly and without condescension, and his eyes flick to the Victor tattoo on her wrist and back up again without comment. “You see how the skin is smooth? Peaches are fuzzy. We can’t grow them so easy here in Two, they don’t take the cold so well. Apricots are much hardier.”

“Huh,” Lyme says, turning the fruit over in her hand. Nero used to bring her peaches all the time; she hadn’t realized he would have had to order them from out of district. Funny, the things mentors don’t tell their Victors. “Do they taste different?”

“Apricots are sweeter,” he says, warming up to his subject the way Emory does when anyone asks her whether you can make jam out of who knows what. “Dry ‘em and they taste just like candy.”

Artemisia needs to dump half a pound of sugar into one cup of coffee before she’ll screw up her face and knock it back like a shot, so that’s probably a good thing. “I’ll take some then,” Lyme says, and the man smiles and runs her up a tab that Victor Affairs will pay from her stipend at the end of the month.

She takes the long way back up to the Village, still thinking about the night before. Artemisia is the kind of name that drags down a baby with the weight of expectation, and now that her girl is a Victor that kind of pressure won’t ever back off. The Village, on the other hand, should be a place to calm down and relax, where some of that stress can slide off.

Lyme keeps musing all the way back to her girl’s house. The sun is coming up over the trees by the time she gets in, and she knocks on the door and waits for Artemisia’s mumbled “’s’open” before slipping inside. “It’s nice out if you want to go for a walk,” Lyme calls out.

“I had my nature yesterday,” Artemisia says in a half-muffled tone that means she’s likely face down at the kitchen table, angling herself to catch the morning sunlight against her back.

That’s exactly what she’s doing, and she’s dressed in one of Lyme’s oversized sweaters with her hair pulled back in a sloppy braid, blinking sleepily up at Lyme and stifling a yawn. It throws Lyme back to the night before the Arena, when the layers of showmanship and gleeful murder peeled away to reveal the teenager underneath. There’s nothing grand or wicked about her at all as she raises her head and props herself up on her hand, her eye half-closed as the skin of her cheek pushes it shut.

“I got some fruit down at the market,” Lyme says, setting the bread and muffins on the counter. “You should try some, they’re good.”

Artemisia sits up, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Cut it up and put it in my mouth for me,” she says, yawning again. “Too tired.”

Lyme snorts, and just then it clicks inside her head. “C’mon, Misha, catch,” she says, and lobs one of the fruits at her.

Her girl’s eyes go wide, but she snatches the apricot out of the air without looking. After a second she stares down at it. “It’s not fuzzy,” she says slowly.

“Peaches are fuzzy, this is an apricot,” Lyme says, and it’s probably stupid to feel as pleased as she does about having a new fact to share, but oh well. “What do you think?”

She takes a bite, teeth slicing through the skin and juicy flesh with a loud slurping sound. “It’s different,” she says, then ducks her head a little and grins. “I like it, though.”

“Good, me too,” says Lyme, tugging the end of her braid on the way past to put the rest of the apricots in the fridge.

Misha grins and takes another bite.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ta-daa!
> 
> Thanks for sticking with me! Artemisia isn't the easiest Victor to love straight off, but I hope people came to understand her. :)


End file.
